JulianeHouse-House How English Triggers Process of Norm Variation in Other Eu Languages

8/10/2019 JulianeHouse-House How English Triggers Process of Norm Variation in Other Eu Languages

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How English TriggersProcesses of Norm Variation in

Other European Languages

Juliane House

[email protected]

http://www.uni-hamburg.de/fachbereiche-einrichtungen/sfb538



Structure

I Project Background, Research

Questions and Hypotheses

II Analytical Procedureand Analysis

III Some Results



1. The Project “Covert Translation”

Globalized communication leads to an ever

increasing demand for parallel“ texts or covert

translations

Research question: whether and how English as a

global lingua franca influences German and other

languages through processes of parallel text

production and covert translation



Parallel texts

texts on comparable topics, which belong to

the same genre and fulfil the same function

Covert translation

the function which a source text has in its

discourse world is maintained in the

translation through the use of a "cultural

filter“ (House1977,1997), with which culture-specific source language norms are adapted

to the norms holding in the "receiving"

language community



The Impact of Global English

Traditional process of cultural filtering may

now be in a process of change!

Is maintenance of target culture norms in

parallel text production and covert

translation no longer operative such that

source and target norms are converging?



General assumptions

German (French, Spanish, later Persian,

Chinese) textual norms are adapted to

Anglophone ones

Adaptations can be located along a limited

set of dimensions of culturally determined,

empirically established communicative

preferences (e.g. preferred foci oninterpersonal or ideational function, on

informational vagueness or specificity)



The Project„s Hypotheses

1. A shift from a conventionally strong

emphasis in German discourse on the

ideational function of language to an

Anglophone interpersonal orientationfocussing on addressee involvement.

2. A shift from a conventionally strong

emphasis on informational explicitness inGerman texts to Anglophone inference-

inducing implicitness and propositional

opaqueness.



3. A shift in information structure from packing

lexical information densely and integratively

in German texts to presenting information ina more loosely linearised, "sentential" way.

4. A shift in word order such that the German“Satzklammer” with its two discontinuous

left and right parts gives way to more

continuous, juxtaposed positions of the twoparts.



The Corpus

about 650 texts (over 800 000 words)

Texts reflect a sphere of production andreception which is of pervasive, global

socio-cultural influence



VALIDATION CORPUS

PARALLEL CORPUS

PRIMARY CORPUS

French Translations

Spanish Translations

GERMAN TEXTS

English

Translations

FRENCH TEXTS

SPANISH TEXTS

Interviews

Background Documentation

Covert Translation

Translation and Parallel Text Corpus

German

Translations

ENGLISH TEXTS



Translation- and Comparable Corpora

(Example: English-German)



Corpus

English-German originals and translations (French and Spanishcontrol texts)

Popular Science Texts

– Scientific American, New Scientist and their satellite journals

– Micro-diachronic: 1978-1982; 1999-2002

– 500 000 Words

Economic Texts

– Annual reports by internationally operating companies

Letters to shareholders, Missions, Visions, Corporatestatements

– Reverse Translation Relation: German-English, French/Spanish-English

– 130 000 Words



Method

Combination of qualitative and quantitative

methods

Qualitative: House Translation EvaluationModel

Quantitative: Frequency Counts

Renewed qualitative analysis



Three Phases of Study

Phase 1: Qualitative Analyses- Result: differences in subjectivity and addresseeorientation in originals and translations

Phase 2: Quantification

- Result: differences in frequency of linguistic means of expressing

subjectivity and addresssee orientation

Phase 3: Re-contextualising qualitative analyses: isolation of all

occurrences of vulnerable elements

- Manual annotation to locate co-occurences with e.g. tense, mood

- Do equivalent elements occur in same linguistic context?

- Are equivalent elements used for same communicative function?

- translation relation, genre-contrastive

Statistics: Multivariate analyses, complex co-occurrence patterns



Genres

Popular Science: articles from Scientific American and National Geographic,

UNESCO Courier

(External) Business Communication:annual reports, letters to shareholders,

visions" and missions", product

presentationsComputer Instructions: software manuals



Texts were scanned, transcribed, formated

and segmented according to orthographicutterance units (sentences, paragraphs,

titles and subtitles must be recognisable)

Comparability: textual stretch functioning

as an introduction



2. Qualitative analytic procedure

House„s (1997) translation model

Two functional components co-present in

every text: ideational & interpersonal that

need to be kept equivalent in translation

Source and target texts to be analysed in

terms of the levels of Language and Text,

Register and Genre. Outcome is as textual

profile and the text„s function



Language, Register and Genre

Genre as content-plane of Register , andRegister as expression plane of Genre;

Register as content plane of Language,Language as expression plane of Register

Function of a text: co-presence of two functionalcomponents: an ideational and an interpersonal

one

Textual function NOT identical with functions oflanguage



Superordinate Features:

Field , Tenor and Mode

Field of Discourse: nature of the social action in

the text, field of activity, content, degree of

lexical generality and specificity

Tenor of Discourse: author and his personal

stance vis-à-vis the content, relationship

between author and addressees (social power,

distance, affect)Mode of Discourse: cohesion, coherence,

degrees of "spokenness" and "writtenness"



Genre

A socially established categorycharacterised in terms of occurrence ofuse, source and a communicative purpose

or any combination of theseLinks a single text to a class of texts unitedby a common communicative purpose

Reflects language users' sharedknowledge about nature of texts of thesame kind



A Scheme for Producing, Analysing andComparing Original and Translation Texts



Overt and covert translation

Covert translation: like a second original

Not marked pragmatically as a translation

May have been created in its own right

Translator creates equivalent speech event

through the use of a cultural filter“



Cultural Filter

Functional equivalence in covert translationachieved through changes on the levels ofLanguage/Text and Register

Text is adapted to target culture normsTranslator looks at source text ‚with the eyes'of target text readers and acts accordingly

Most imortant are changes to a text„sinterpersonal functional component for whichvalues along dimensions of Tenor and Mode are crucial



Translators need reliable information

about culture-specific communicative

preferences drawn from contrastive

pragmatic discourse analyses

E.g. German speakers„ tendency to

emphasise the ideational functional

component of texts, whereas Englishspeakers tend to give equal weight to the

interpersonal functional component





Analytical Process

1. Analysis of English original along thedimensions Field , Tenor and Mode

- Setting up a text-profile on the basis of

analytical findings on lexical, syntacticand textual levels that reflect theindividual textual function

2. Analysis of translation along the samedimensions

3. Comparison of source and translation



3. Qualitative contrastive analyses

of English-German translations in

two genres3.1 Popular science texts

English original texts

mostly taken from the popular scientificmagazine Scientific American

Addressees are interested lay readers

Specialised lexis is mostly absent inEnglish originals, texts are more popular“

than scientific“!



- German translations of these texts

appeared in the German satellitepublication Spektrum der Wissenschaft

- Higher level of technical, specialisedlanguage in German texts

- Generally more explicit, translations give

etymological derivations, "unpack"informational content, tend to providedetailed explanations and interpretations.



(1) HIV Vaccines: Prospects andChallenges, in: Scientific American,

Juli 1998/ Wie nahe ist ein HIV-

Impfstoff, (BT: How close is a HIV

vaccine) in: Spektrum der

Wissenschaft , Oktober 1998



Most vaccines activate what is called the

humoral arm of the immune system.

Die meisten Vakzine aktivieren den

sogenannten humoralen Arm des

Immunsystems (nach lateinisch humor,

Flüssigkeit)

(BT: Most vaccines activate the so-called

humoral arm of the immune system (after

Latin humor, liquid.)



(2) Gazzaniga, M., The Split Brain

Revisited, in: Scientific American July 1998/ Rechtes und linkes

Gehirn: Split-Brain undBewußtsein, in: Spektrum der

Wissenschaft, Dezember 1998

(BT: Right and Left Brain: Split-

Brain and Consciousness)



Groundbreaking work that began more than a quarter

of a century ago has led to ongoing insights about

brain organisation and consciousness.

Jahrzehntelange Studien an Patienten mit chirurgisch

getrennten Großhirnhälften haben das Verständnis fürden funktionellen Aufbau des Gehirns und das Wesen

des Bewußtseins vertieft.

(BT: Decade-long studies on patients with surgically

separated brain hemispheres have deepened theunderstanding of the functional organisation of the

brain and the essence of consciousness.)



(3) Buchbinder, S., AvoidingInfection after HIV-Exposure, in:

Scientific American July 1998 /

Prävention nach HIV-Kontakt, in:Spektrum der Wissenschaft,

Oktober 1998 (BT: Preventionafter HIV-Contact)



Treatment may reduce the chance of contracting

HIV infection after a risky encounter.

Eine sofortige Behandlung nach Kontakt mit einer

Ansteckungsquelle verringert unter Umständen die

Gefahr, dass sich das Human-Immunschwäche-

Virus im Körper festsetzt. Gewähr gibt es keine,zudem erwachsen eigene Risiken.

(BT: An immediate treatment after contact reduces

under certain circumstances the danger that the

human immuno-deficiency-virus establishes itself inthe. There is no guarantee for this, moreover new

risks arise.)



“Didactic tenor“

of German translations

Translators may have assumed a lack of

knowledge on the part of the reader

In the English texts, the addressees are “drawn into

the text” to make them personally involved

Addressees of English texts are "invited" to identifywith the persons depicted in the text‟s discourse

world through the use of various linguistic means



(4) Buchbinder, S., AvoidingInfection after HIV Exposure, in:

Scientific American, July 1998/

Prävention nach HIV-Kontakt, in:Spektrum der Wissenschaft ,

Oktober 1998 (BT: Preventionafter HIV-Contact)

I



I

1 Suppose you are a doctor in an emergencyroom

2 and a patient tells you she was raped twohours earlier.

3 She is afraid she may have been exposed to

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS4 but has heard that there is a "morning-after

pill" to prevent HIV infection.

II1 Can you in fact do anything to block the virus

2 from replicating and establishing infection?

1 I d N tf ll f h i K k h



1 In der Notfallaufnahme eines Krankenhausesberichtet eine Patientin

2 sie sei vor zwei Stunden vergewaltigt worden

3 und nun in Sorge, dem AIDS-Erregerausgesetzt zu sein,

4 sie habe aber gehört, es gebe eine "Pille

danach",5 die eine HIV-Infektion verhüte.

6 Kann der Arzt überhaupt irgendetwas tun,

7 was eventuell vorhandene Viren hindernwürde,

8 sich zu vermehren und sich dauerhaft im

Körper einzunisten?



(BT: In the emergency room of a hospital a

patient reports that she had been raped twohours ago and was now worrying that she

had been exposed to the AIDS-Virus. She

said she had heard that there was an "After-Pill", which might prevent an HIV-infection.

Can the doctor in fact do anything which

might prevent potentially existing viruses from

replicating and establishing themselvespermanently in the body?)



English texts

Mental processes“ are used to establish a

personal relationship with the addressee

A text„s Field is made familiar to addresseesFurther linguistic means: mood switches,

dramatisation of scientific reports

Strong cohesion through extensive use ofrepetition, structural parallelism, linguistic

routines, deliberate ‚framing„ of a text



German texts

Feature only relational and material processes

(in the sense of Halliday) in different distributions

Lack of mental processes

No offer of identification to addresseesSyntactically more complex structures (left

branching pre-nominal modification, absence of

rhetorical mechanisms such as parallelism)

Less macro-cohesive, more micro-organized“





3.2. Economic Texts“Missions" and "visions“, letters to shareholders

In English texts: simple colloquial style with fewspecialised economic terminology

Routinised lexical phrases reminiscent of

advertisementsPositive connotations, comparatives, superlatives,intensifiers,

Optimistic, consistently positive, often enthusiastic

self-presentation of companies and their agentsHeavy use of personal deixis as identificationanchors

In German texts all these features less pronounced!



(5) Multisyn Vision 2000

Connected Creativity

1 I want to be part of a company where I am challenged to:2 - Have fun creating new ideas that improve our performance in the market

3 - Obsessively search for new ideas, by observing, listening and learningfrom everyone

Connected Creativity

1 Ich will Teil eines Unternehmens sein, das mich herausfordert:

2 - Mit Spaß neue Ideen zu kreieren, die unsere Performance am Marktverbessern

3 - Intensive neue Ideen zu suchen durch beobachten, zuhören und lernen

von jedem

(BT: I want to be part of a company which challenges me:

- with fun to create new ideas, which improve our performance in the market

- to look for intensive new ideas through observing, listening and learning

from everyone.)



Single-minded passion for winning

1 I want to be part of a company where I am challenged to:

2 - Have unrelentingly high expectations of myself and others

3 - Say "No" to anything that is not clearly aligned with thewinning strategy

Single-minded passion for winning

1 Ich will Teil eines Unternehmens sein, das michherausfordert:

2 - Hohe Erwartungen an mich und andere zu stellen

3 - "Nein" zu sagen, zu allem, was nicht klar mit derGewinnenwollen-Strategie verbunden ist

(BT: I want to be part of a company which challenges me to

- put high expectations onto me and others

- say "No" to everything that is not clearly connected with the

Want-to-win Strategy.)

S f Q li i A l i f



Summary of Qualitative Analysis of

Texts in Two Genres

None of our hypotheses confirmed

But: indication of a shift in the use of those

linguistic means which realise the

interpersonal functional component (stance“,

expressivity“, point of view“, addressee

orientation)

First signs of adaptation processes of Germanto Anglo-American textual norms (genre-

mixing)



Rapprochement to Anglophone textual

norms expressed in a stronger presenceof "subjectivity" and "addressee

orientation” – to be examined under the

dimension TENOR and its subcategoriesStance and Social Role Relationship,

Social Attitude and Participation

“S bj ti it ”



“Subjectivity”

A speaker‟s ability to represent and constitutehimself in and through language as a

“subject”

Related in systemic-functional theory toStance (Biber 2004):

- "epistemic stance" relating to the speaker‟s

assessment of the truth of the proposition- "attitudinal stance" referring to the author‟s

personal attitude, his value judgements and

expectations



Hunston & Thompson (2001):

subjectivity examined under the category of

"evaluation" consisting of "stance" and"viewpoint" vis à vis the proposition

Smith (2002, 2003):two types of subjectivity:

(1) "point of view" (linguistic units expressing

a way of looking at things) and(2) "perspective" ('perspectivising' utterances

that present a situation or state of affairs from

a certain standpoint)



But subjectivity can also be said to relate to

the function certain linguistic means have

when it comes to influencing hearers (Smith2003; Nuyts 2001): interactive function,

“Intersubjectivity”

Similar labels are Epistemic Modality (Salkie

2002; Facchinetti et al. 2003), Emotive

Prosody (Bublitz 2003), Evidentiality (Chafe &Nichols 1986), Metadiscourse (Le 2004,

Hyland 1998, Hyland & Tse 2004), as well as

“politeness in text” (House 1998, 2005)



4. Diachronic qualitative analyses

Popular science:

contrastive analyses of English originals,

German translations and German originals:

two time frames 1978-1982 and 1999-2002

Differences found in the following areas:



(1) Description of Content

Older German translations more explicitly

structured (use of temporal adverbials,

conditional and causal conjunctions,

advance organizers (lists)



(2) Personalising Science

Older English texts:

- more sentence adverbials

- more complement constructions

- more evaluative lexis- more process-oriented verbs

- more speaker-hearer deixis)

- lexical und syntactic parallelism



Differences much less marked in second

time frame 1999-2002!

Addressee-orientation through presence of

speaker-hearer deixis, material and mental

processes; simulated interaction betweenauthor and addressees via mood switches;

colloquial lexis, expressions of modality



(3) Explicitation

Older German translations:explicitations particularly on meta-level via

text commenting devices ("Es muss an dieser

Stelle betont werden“ BT: It must be stressedat this point) as well as explanations (didactic

function).

Newer German translations:addressees' knowledge often presupposed,

however still: systematic enrichment with

additional details



Diachronic Qualitative Analyses of

Economic Texts

Increasing difficulties with finding translations

of corporate statements - English only!!

Changes over time with respect to the

following phenomena related to subjectivity

and addressee orientation:



Mood

Newer letters to shareholders: increased use

of interrogatives and imperatives (effect:

simulated interaction between author and

addressee

Striking: linkage of imperatives with direct

address of readers, often with requests,warning, threat, announcements



Modality

Modal verbs preferably used in final

paragraphs (announcements of furtheraction, Böttger & Bührig 2003)



Narrative Sequences

Much greater frequency in newer texts

Narratives replace Reports and

Descriptions (Böttger & Probst 2001)



5. Validating qualitative analyses

Translations from English into French and

Spanish to validate results of analyses ofEnglish-German translations

F h t l ti f l i



French translations of popular science

texts

Fewer expressions of Subjectivity than in the

English and German texts due to:

- fewer particles and colloquial forms- preference of metaphorical instead of

congruent constructions, of literal rather than

figurative forms- frequent shift of perspective from author or

addressee to a third person



Lack of involvement of addressees:

- lack of mental processes and hearer deixis

- no offer of identification to readers- absence of narrative frames and co-

ordinating conjunctions – that indicated an

adaptation to Anglophone norms in theGerman translations



Spanish translations of economic texts

Sentences with active constructions in

English often changed into passives

Paratactic structures favoured in Englishoften transformed into hypotactic structures in

Spanish

Fewer narrative sequences in SpanishHigher degree of formality in addressing

readers and in choice of lexis



German translations thus tend to be muchcloser to their English originals than

French and Spanish ones, i.e., no

confirmation of an equivalent influence of

English norms on native French and

Spanish norms!



6. Quantitative Diachronic Analyses

To verify the results of the qualitative

analyses

To reveal preferred usage of salient individual

forms with respect to collocations and co-occurrence patterns in the texts



Subjectivity and adressee orientationoperationalized as occurrences of:

modal verbs, semi-modals, modal words,particles, mental processes, deixis,connective particles, sentence adverbials,ing -adverbials, progressive aspect ,sentential mood, complement constructions,„frames‟, commenting parentheses,

evaluative lexis(distribution and frequency examined incomparative diachronic analysis)



Data Basis (Popular Science)

English monolingual texts from the years 1999-2002 (122866 words).

The German translations of these English texts(113420 words).

German monolingual texts from the years 1999-2002 (100648 words).

English monolingual texts from the years 1978-1982 (42497 words).

The German translations of these English texts(37830 words).

German monolingual texts from the years 1978-1982 (82480 words).







(1) Deixis

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

1978-1982 1999-2002

E

DÜ

D



(2) Modality

Particles Modal words

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

1978-1982 1999-2002

DÜ

D

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

1978-1982 1999-2002

DÜ

D



(3) Mental Processes

0

50

100

150

1978-1982 1999-2002

EDÜ

D



(4) Connectivity

And / Und Pronominal adverbials

0

2

4

6

8

1978-1982 1999-2002

E

DÜ

D

010

20

30

40

50

60

1978-1982 1999-2002

E

DÜ

D





Modified hypothesis

Changes in German text conventions

through contact with English texts take

place through register-specific variation ofthe use of certain linguistic means, which

are reflected in a changed function of the

text as a whole

7 Cause and Effect? Three



7. Cause and Effect? Three

explanatory hypotheses

Cause and effect? What exactly causes thechanges found? Three explanatory hypotheses:

Changes through translation from English as alocus of direct language contact !

Changes through omnipresence of globalEnglish, i.e. translation as a locus of indirect

language contact !Translation is innocent! Translators conservenorms of target language!

The Booh Factor:



The Booh Factor:

Translation as Mediator of the

English Take-Over

Translational process effects change!

The X Factor:



The X Factor:

Universal Impact of Globalisation

Translational process reflects change!

The Green Factor:



Translation as Cultural

Conservation

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JulianeHouse-House How English Triggers Process of Norm Variation in Other Eu Languages