Corpora: translation in linguistics

Dan I. SLOBIN (slobin@cogsci.berkeley.edu)
Sat, 4 Dec 1999 22:41:26 -0800 (PST)

I've made use of translations of motion events in novels to demonstrate
relatively greater attention to manner of motion in "satellite-framed"
languages (English, German, Dutch, Russian, Serbo-Croatian), in comparison
with "verb-framed" languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French,
Hebrew, Turkish). Briefly, translations from a satellite-framed language
into a verb-framed language are marked by omission of much detail with
regard to manner of motion, whereas translations in the opposite direction
often add manner that was only implied in the verb-framed original.
References:

Slobin, D. I. (1996). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and
Spanish. In M. Shibatani & S. Thompson (Eds.), _Essays in semantics_,
(pp. 195-217). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Slobin, D. I. (1997). Mind, code, and text. In J. Bybee, J. Haiman, & S.
A. Thompson (Eds.), _Essays on language function and language type:
Dedicated to T. Givon_ (pp. 437-467). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.

Slobin, D. I. (in press). Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to
linguistic relativity and determinism. In S. Niemeier & R. Dirven (Eds.),
_Evidence for linguistic relativity_. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
[Circulated as Working Paper #449, Series A: General and Theoretical
Papers, LAUD 1998. Essen, Germany.]

Slobin, D. I. (in press). How people move: Discourse effects of
linguistic typology. In C. L. Moder & A. Martinovic-Zic (Eds.),
_Discourse across languages and cultures_. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.


> I am investigating why translation is so little used as a source of data
> in linguistics, as compared to the traditional database comprising
> sentences with acceptability judgments, conversation/text and sovereign
> monolingual productions in general.
>
> I am interested in (as distinct from translation pedagogy, translation
> theory per se):
>
> (i) instances of translation being evoked in arguments about
> language/thought (I only have a few examples so far, eg the Katz-Keenan
> papers (1972, 1978) on the (im)possibility of exact translation,
> Jackendoff's (1996) argument to illustrate the thought-language
> distinction) (ii) use of actual translation (interpreting) data
> (corpora) in linguistic inquiry, i.e.
> application of linguistic analysis and inference to such data.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Robin Setton