Simplified or not Simplified? The Different Guises of Mediated English at the European Parliament

Abstract

In this article we describe a framework for the corpus-based comparative investigation of interpreting and translation, illustrating it through a study of simplification across different modes of language production and across different language pairs. We rely on EPTIC, a corpus featuring plenary speeches at the European Parliament in their interpreted and translated versions, aligned to each other and to their source texts in English<=>Italian and English<=>French. Aiming to shed light on lexical simplification in different mediation modes, we compare interpretations and translations to each other and to comparable original speeches and their edited written versions. Specifically, we compare lexical features (lexical density, type-token ratio, core vocabulary and list head coverage) in interpreting and translation into English from French and Italian, both in a monolingual comparable perspective and an intermodal perspective. Our results do not unconditionally support the simplification hypothesis: lexical simplification is observed in mediated English, but is found to be greater when the source language is French, and in interpretations rather than translations. We conclude that this feature is contingent on both the mediation mode and the source languages involved, and that the influence of the latter seems to be stronger than that of the former.

Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification

“…These differences present a clear picture that English translations from Chinese is unique, genre-specific and possibly governed by some source language norms. Our research findings echoed previous studies which identified that the simplification level of translated texts is not universal and to a large extent subject to the source language influence [55,60].…”

“…It should be noted that corpus-based translation research in the quest of TUs in European settings has largely ignored the variable of translation directionality. In a recent research utilizing a multilingual corpus featuring plenary speeches at the European Parliament with English translated texts together Italian and French source texts, it was found that source language serves a key variable in affecting the simplification level of translated texts [ 55 ]. The current research which examined translated English with Chinese as the source language (a typologically different language than English) will yield some interesting findings than most studies which are based on European languages.…”

Du texte aux ressources multimodales : faire avancer la recherche en interprétation à partir d’un corpus déjà existant†

“…Comme nous décrivons les applications des corpus d'interprétation en recherche et en enseignement dans d'autres sections du présent article, nous fournirons ici deux exemples d'applications basées sur les composants multimodaux. On a très récemment utilisé EPTIC pour étudier la simplification lexicale dans différents modes de médiation, en comparant des interprétations et des traductions du français et de l'italien vers l'anglais à des discours originaux comparables en anglais et à leurs versions écrites modifiées (Ferraresi, Bernardini et al 2018). EPTIC offrant la possibilité de combiner les perspectives monolingue et multimodale et différentes langues sources, les auteurs ont pu conclure que l'hypothèse de la simplification comme tendance universelle de la médiation interlinguistique n'est pas réalisée inconditionnellement.…”

Translator's Style Through Lexical Bundles: A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Two English Translations of Hongloumeng

“…Despite the dearth of research on TU, the universality of translated texts has been controversial and increasingly challenged by recent corpus-based research. For example, researchers have found that other variables such as source language (Williams, 2005;Ferraresi et al, 2018) and genre (Kruger and Van Rooy, 2012) can affect the profiling of translated texts besides translation status. As different translators speak different first languages, come from different backgrounds, receive different professional training, and serve different translation purposes, stylistic variance, which can distinguish a translator's style, unavoidably exists.…”