A Corpus-Based Analysis of Lexical Items Conveying Body Language in the COVALT Corpus

Abstract

After highlighting the affinities between Descriptive Translation Studies and Corpusbased Translation Studies, this paper aims to examine five verbs denoting bodily expression which occur frequently in English fiction (frown, gasp, shrug, sniff and stare) and how they fare in Catalan translation. The analysis is based on COVALT (Valencian Corpus of Translated Literature), a multilingual corpus (still under construction) made up of the translations into Catalan of narrative works originally written in English, French and German published in the autonomous region of Valencia from 1990 to 2000. This analysis has been partly carried out by means of a bilingual concordancer (AlfraCOVALT) developed by the COVALT research group. Results show that, although Catalan translators tend to use the standard equivalents provided by the bilingual dictionary (mainly consisting in more or less fixed collocations, and variations on those collocations), evidence is found of other, diverging tendencies such as explicitation (most conspicuous in query matches for frown) and simplification (in the translation of stare, above all). This -although in varying degrees -bears witness to translators' versatility and creativity.