Rethinking translation unit size : an empirical study of an English-Japanese newswire corpus
The translation unit has been regarded as an elusive notion in linguistics. The literature shows that there seems to be little agreement regarding, in particular, their identification and size. This study attempts to rethink these two central issues of translation units with the help of a parallel corpus: the ARC (the Alignment of Reuters Corpora), an English-Japanese newswire corpus. The main achievements of this study are: the identification of five variables associated with translation unit size; the establishment of an unbiased, reproducible identification method; and, the demonstration that translation pairs (i.e. translation units and their equivalents) are ideal for contrastive analysis. The identification method, âthe one-equivalent principleâ, established in this thesis is justified linguistically by a thorough, systematic review of the relevant literature, and empirically using nine case studies. The target words of the case studies were the most frequent content words in the ARC: market; government; year; economic; new; foreign; said; told; and, expected. The examination of translation unit size, as well as non-translation units and translation pairs, shows that parallel corpora, and the one-equivalent
Kondo, Fumiko
PE English ; PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
Rethinking translation unit size : an empirical study of an English-Japanese newswire corpus. The translation unit has been regarded as an elusive notion in linguistics. The literature shows that there seems to be little agreement regarding, in particular, their identification and size. This study attempts to rethink these two central issues of translation units with the help of a parallel corpus: the ARC (the Alignment of Reuters Corpora), an English-Japanese newswire corpus. The main achievements of this study are: the identification of five variables associated with translation unit size; the establishment of an unbiased, reproducible identification method; and, the demonstration that translation pairs (i.e. translation units and their equivalents) are ideal for contrastive analysis. The identification method, âthe one-equivalent principleâ, established in this thesis is justified linguistically by a thorough, systematic review of the relevant literature, and empirically using nine case studies. The target words of the case studies were the most frequent content words in the ARC: market; government; year; economic; new; foreign; said; told; and, expected. The examination of translation unit size, as well as non-translation units and translation pairs, shows that parallel corpora, and the one-equivalent
rethinking translation unit size empirical_study english_japanese corpus translation unit regard elusive notion linguistics literature show seem little agreement regard particular identification size study_attempt rethink central_issue translation unit help parallel_corpus arc alignment corpora english_japanese corpus main achievement study identification variable associate translation unit size establishment identification method demonstration translation pair translation unit equivalent ideal contrastive_analysis identification method equivalent principle establish justified linguistically thorough systematic_review relevant_literature empirically use case_study target_word case_study frequent content word arc market government year economic new foreign say tell expect examination translation unit size well non translation unit translation pair show parallel_corpus equivalent