Mario Bisiada

Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from hypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures, and have attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This paper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of concessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic corpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing studies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce existing findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of manuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated texts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English concessive conjunctions between 1982/83 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic structures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this development is restricted to translated language. In non-transl...

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019.

This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the concept of centripetal-centrifugal struggle to critical discourse studies to analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought into competition in political language to justify paradigm changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme and change in foreign policy, a paradigm shift that had previously been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a qualitative analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular powerful discourses, centring some powerful ones and marginalising others, constructing an existential threat for Germany, the so-called watershed, a new situation which casts his policies of German armament as without alternative. The paper demonstrates the strength of the analysis of dialogically contracti...

This conceptual article argues that class is a major factor in the social division and polarisation after the Covid-19 pandemic. Current discourse and communication analyses of phenomena such as compliance with measures and vaccine hesitancy seek explanations mainly in opposing ideological stances, ignoring existing structural inequalities and class relations and their effects on people's decisions. I approach social cohesion in the Covid-19 pandemic through the theories of epidemic psychology, which sees language as fundamental in social conflicts during pandemics, and progressive neoliberalism, which critiques a post-industrial social class whose assumed moral superiority and talking down to working-class people is argued to be an explanation of many current social conflicts. I argue that these theories construct a valuable theoretical framework for explaining and analysing the social division and polarisation that has resulted from the pandemic. Reducing non-compliance with mitigating measures and vaccine hesitancy to an ideological issue implies that it can be countered by combatting misinformation and anti-vaccination thinking and shutting down particular discourses, which grossly simplifies the problem. The impact that class relations and inequality have on political and health issues, coupled with the characteristics of progressive neoliberalism, may partially explain the rise of populist and nativist movements. I conclude that if social cohesion is to be maintained through the ongoing climate emergency, understanding the impacts of progressive neoliberalism and the role of contempt in exclusionary discursive practices is of utmost importance.

This article critically examines the discourse around the Covid-19 pandemic to investigate the widespread polarisation evident in social media debates. The model of epidemic psychology holds that initial adverse reactions to a new disease spread through linguistic interaction. The main argument is that the mediation of the pandemic through social media has fomented the effects of epidemic psychology in the reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic by providing continued access to commentary and linguistic interaction. This social interaction in the absence of any knowledge on the new disease can be seen as a discourse of knowledge production, conducted largely on social media. This view, coupled with a critical approach to the power relations inherent in all processes of knowledge production, provides an approach to understanding the dynamics of polarisation, which is, arguably, issue-related and not along common ideological lines of left and right. The paper critiques two discursive struct...

This article examines 1,353 tweets on #MeToo in English, Spanish and German from July and August 2019, revealing how #MeToo is most commonly referred to as a “movement” in English and Spanish but as a “debate” in German, a difference that echoes German-language press habits. Based on an analysis of semantic prosody, the study demonstrates that words indicating longevity such as “era” and “times” collocate with #MeToo in English and Spanish, but not in German. This points to a framing of #MeToo as influential and long-term in English and Spanish and as exaggerated and short-term in German. Reflecting this difference, #MeToo is talked about in more negative terms in German tweets compared to English and Spanish, as shown by a qualitative analysis of evaluative author stance. The study adds to existing knowledge of the power of hashtags for feminist social media activism by highlighting the importance of (cross-)linguistic corpus-assisted discourse studies of hashtags on social media, ...

A range of studies have pointed to the importance of considering the influence of editors in studies of translated language. Those studies have concentrated on particular features, which allowed them to study those features in detail, but also prevented them from providing an overall picture of the linguistic properties of the texts in question. This study addresses this issue by conducting a multivariate analysis of unedited and edited translations of English business articles into German. We aim to investigate whether translation manuscripts have a characteristically different distribution of lexico-grammatical features compared to edited translations, and whether editors normalize those features and thus assimilate the translations to non-translated texts. Findings related to individual features are in line with the previously observed phenomena of sentence splitting and passive voice, and a general tendency towards increasing readability. In general, however, no profound effect ...

Guided by the hypothesis that translation is a language contact situation that can influence language change, this study investigates a frequency shift from hypotactic to paratactic constructions in concessive and causal clauses in German management and business writing. The influence of the English SVO word order is assumed to cause language users of German to prefer verb-second, paratactic constructions to verb-final, hypotactic ones. The hypothesis is tested using a 1 million word diachronic corpus containing German translations and their source texts as well as a corpus of German non-translations. The texts date from 1982?3 and 2008, which allows a diachronic analysis of changes in the way English causal and concessive structures have been translated. The analysis shows that in the translations, parataxis is indeed becoming more frequent at the expense of hypotaxis, a phenomenon that, to some extent, also occurs in the non-translations. Based on a corpus of unedited draft transl...

It has been claimed that translation universals are really "mediation universals" (Chesterman 2004; Ulrych & Murphy 2008), pertaining to the more general cognitive activity of mediating a text rather than specifically translating it. Among those linguistic activities that share the alleged mediation effect with translating are editing and revising. In this chapter, I critically examine the theory of "mediation universals" by comparing unedited translations with edited translations and with edited non-translations. The focus is on explicitation, normalisation/conservatism and simplification. The operationalisations are partly adopted from a similar study on English by Kruger (2012), which the present study seeks to replicate for German management and business articles. The results do not support the notion of mediation universals for the present corpus but rather show that translated texts are recognisable as such even after the editing process. Editorial influence on translated language in this genre is shown to be strongest in terms of sentence length and lexical diversity, where unedited and edited translations differ significantly from each other. Here, editors approximate the language to that of the non-translations, though the unedited translations have a greater average sentence length than the non-translations. That finding does not support the usual observation that translated texts have shorter sentences than non-translations, but highlights the importance of studying editorial influence in translation. That translations are hybrid texts, influenced by many agents other than the translator is now trivial knowledge. Yet corpus research in translation studies still relies mainly on published translations. The findings in this chapter argue for including unedited manuscripts in corpus-based studies of translated language to avoid missing phenomena of translated language that may be removed at the editing stage and to be able to differentiate which features really pertain to the translation act and which are affected by editorial influence.

It has been claimed that translation universals are really “mediation universals” (Chesterman 2004; Ulrych & Murphy 2008), pertaining to the more general cognitive activity of mediating a text rather than specifically translating it. Among those linguistic activities that share the alleged mediation effect with translating are editing and revising. In this chapter, I critically examine the theory of “mediation universals” by comparing unedited translations with edited translations and with edited non-translations. The focus is on explicitation, normalisation/ conservatism and simplification. The operationalisations are partly adopted from a similar study on English by Kruger (2012), which the present study seeks to replicate for German management and business articles. The results do not support the notion of mediation universals for the present corpus but rather show that translated texts are recognisable as such even after the editing process. Editorial influence on translated lan...

Most corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus. This overlooks interventions by other agents involved in translation such as editors, who may have significant influence on the translated text. In order to study editors’ influence on the translation product, this paper presents a comparative analysis of manuscript and published translations, which allows a differentiation of actual translated language and edited translated language. Based on a tripartite parallel corpus of English business articles and their translations into German, I analyse translators’ and editors’ influence on grammatical metaphoricity of the text, specifically on the use of nominalisations. One finding is that a significant amount of nominalisation is re-verbalised by editors. The results show that translated language may often be the result of significant editorial intervention. Thus, by just considering source text and published translation, our picture of what tran...

This article critically examines the discourse around the Covid-19 pandemic to investigate the widespread polarisation evident in social media debates. The model of epidemic psychology holds that initial adverse reactions to a new disease spread through linguistic interaction. The main argument is that the mediation of the pandemic through social media has fomented the effects of epidemic psychology in the reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic by providing continued access to commentary and linguistic interaction. This social interaction in the absence of any knowledge on the new disease can be seen as a discourse of knowledge production, conducted largely on social media. This view, coupled with a critical approach to the power relations inherent in all processes of knowledge production, provides an approach to understanding the dynamics of polarisation, which is, arguably, issue-related and not along common ideological lines of left and right. The paper critiques two discursive structures of exclusion, the terms science and conspiracy theory, which have characterised the knowledge production discourse of the Covid-19 pandemic on social media. As strategies of dialogic contraction, they are based on a hegemonic view of knowledge production and on the simplistic assumption of an emancipated position outside ideology. Such an approach, though well-intentioned, may ultimately undermine social movements of knowledge production and thus threaten the very values it aims to protect. Instead, the paper proposes a Foucauldian approach that problematises truth claims and scientificity as always ideological and that is aware of power as inherent to all knowledge production.

This article examines 1,353 tweets on #MeToo in English, Spanish and German from July and August 2019, revealing how #MeToo is most commonly referred to as a "movement" in English and Spanish but as a "debate" in German, a difference that echoes German-language press habits. Based on an analysis of semantic prosody, the study demonstrates that words indicating longevity such as "era" and "times" collocate with #MeToo in English and Spanish, but not in German. This points to a framing of #MeToo as influential and long-term in English and Spanish and as exaggerated and short-term in German. Reflecting this difference, #MeToo is talked about in more negative terms in German tweets compared to English and Spanish, as shown by a qualitative analysis of evaluative author stance. The study adds to existing knowledge of the power of hashtags for feminist social media activism by highlighting the importance of (cross-)linguistic corpus-assisted discourse studies of hashtags on social media, which helps understand the ways in which anti-feminist discourse taps into the channelling of emotions through hashtags to undermine cross-national women's movements.

Most corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus. This overlooks interventions by other agents involved in translation such as editors, who may have significant influence on the translated text. In order to study editors' influence on the translation product, this paper presents a comparative analysis of manuscript and published translations, which allows a differentiation of actual translated language and edited translated language. Based on a tripartite parallel corpus of English business articles and their translations into German, I analyse translators' and editors' influence on grammatical metaphoricity of the text, specifically on the use of nominalisations. One finding is that a significant amount of nominalisation is re-verbalised by editors. The results show that translated language may often be the result of significant editorial intervention. Thus, by just considering source text and published translation, our picture of what translators actually do may be significantly distorted.

The work of editors and their influence on translated texts is an under-researched phenomenon in translation studies. We usually attribute the language we encounter in translated texts to translators, ignoring any intervention that another agent might have made when producing the translation. This paper deals with editors' influence on nominalisation in English to German translation. There is a conflict between language users' preference in German for a nominal style and the demand by house styles to avoid nominal formulations, based on journalistic presumptions of readers' aversion to that style. Studying expressions that translators nominalised, I investigate when editors intervene to change those expressions into verbal structures and when they decide to retain the nominalisation. I use a corpus of manuscript and published translations of business articles to differentiate translators' and editors' actions. Findings show that editors systematically intervene in the text based on readability considerations. At times the only change they make is turning noun into verb, especially when function verb complexes or preposition-noun-constructions are involved, but often they reformulate the entire sentence. While translators are shown to nominalise a lot more than editors, there are some instances where editors nominalise constructions, again along with significant changes to the sentence.

Though editing and revising are integral parts of translation, their effects on the language of the final translated text has scarcely been studied. Phenomena we observe in translated text are usually attributed to ‘the translator’, even though the multitude of agents involved in translation may also be responsible for them to various degrees. This paper promotes the use of manuscripts in corpus-based translation studies by investigating differences in nominalisation between unedited and edited translations. Using a corpus of manuscript and published German translations of English business articles, I investigate what may motivate editors to replace a nominalisation in the translation manuscript by a verb to match the English source text. For this purpose, I analyse differences in the process types of the nominalised source text verbs and the structure and information density of the nominal group the nominalisation appears in. The findings show that editors take extensive and systematic influence on the translated text. Crucially, the analysis shows that studies that only consider the published version of a translation often mistake for a literal translation a sentence that has undergone a considerable amount of shifts while passing through the stages of translation.

Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from hypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures, and have attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This paper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of concessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic corpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing studies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce existing findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of manuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated texts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English concessive conjunctions between 1982/83 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic structures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this development is restricted to translated language. In non-translated texts, the use of hypotactic conjunctions has increased. The use of sentence-initial conjunctions , however, does seem to spread in this genre (as was reported for popular science), which may be further evidence for it to be a case of language change through contact in translation.

It has been claimed that translation universals are really "mediation universals" (Chesterman 2004; Ulrych & Murphy 2008), pertaining to the more general cognitive activity of mediating a text rather than specifically translating it. Among those linguistic activities that share the alleged mediation effect with translating are editing and revising. In this chapter, I critically examine the theory of "mediation universals" by comparing unedited translations with edited translations and with edited non-translations. The focus is on explicitation, normalisation/conservatism and simplification. The operationalisations are partly adopted from a similar study on English by Kruger (2012), which the present study seeks to replicate for German management and business articles. The results do not support the notion of mediation universals for the present corpus but rather show that translated texts are recognisable as such even after the editing process. Editorial influence on translated language in this genre is shown to be strongest in terms of sentence length and lexical diversity, where unedited and edited translations differ significantly from each other. Here, editors approximate the language to that of the non-translations, though the unedited translations have a greater average sentence length than the non-translations. That finding does not support the usual observation that translated texts have shorter sentences than non-translations, but highlights the importance of studying editorial influence in translation. That translations are hybrid texts, influenced by many agents other than the translator is now trivial knowledge. Yet corpus research in translation studies still relies mainly on published translations. The findings in this chapter argue for including unedited manuscripts in corpus-based studies of translated language to avoid missing phenomena of translated language that may be removed at the editing stage and to be able to differentiate which features really pertain to the translation act and which are affected by editorial influence.

Sentence splitting is assumed to occur mainly in translations from languages that prefer a hierarchical discourse structure, such as German, to languages that prefer an incremental structure. This article challenges that assumption by presenting findings from a diachronic corpus study of English–German business article translations, which shows that sentence splitting has long been common in German business translation, and perhaps because of editorial guidelines, has increased strongly over the course of the 25 years under analysis. A corpus of unedited draft versions and published versions of the same translations is used to show that sentence splitting is also affected by editors where translators did not split the sentence. The evidence suggests that sentence splitting may be a strategy of explicitation in translation rather than a phenomenon triggered mainly in translation into languages with incremental discourse structures. The observed increase in sentence splitting in German may indicate a shift by which meaning relations are increasingly made between sentences using cohesive resources of reference rather than within sentences using grammatical devices such as hypotaxis or parataxis.

This paper contributes to the field of diachronic corpus studies of linguistic change through language contact in translation by replicating Becher’s (2011) study which found a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in concessive clause complexes of German popular scientific articles, and examining whether a comparable trend can be found in causal clause complexes in another genre. The study draws on a one-million-word translation corpus of English business articles and their German translations, as well as on a comparable corpus of German non-translations. The corpora consist of texts published in two time periods, 1982–3 and 2008. German translations of English causal conjunctions are compared for both time periods to determine diachronic changes in causal clause complexes. The comparable corpus is then analysed to find out whether those changes also happened in non-translated language. While a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in both corpora can be observed, hypotaxis remains more frequent than parataxis. The study also detects a shift in preference for the causal conjunctions "weil", "denn" and "da", which partly causes the decrease in hypotaxis.

The quality of [R] in Germanic dialects is one of the most
discussed phonological topics in Historical Linguistics, circling around one main question: Was it front or back? Scholars have proposed a back sound arisen through foreign influence as well as a native uvular trill. In this paper, I offer a comparative survey of the available literature, from the earliest superficial comments to modern in-depth dialect analysis, providing a synthesis of the arguments that have been proposed over time. Though no definite answer can ever be found, I provide what I regard to be a plausible
answer as the outcome of the research that underlies this paper.