No abstract

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 conjunctionsweil,dennandda, which partly causes the decrease in hypotaxis.

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.

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.