Abstracts
Abstract
Little research has been conducted so far into the translation-specific features that are dependent on both the source and the target language. This study aims at examining whether Modern Greek translated popular science articles differ from non-translated ones by being closer to the source language, which is English, in terms of the frequency and the word order of the passive voice constructions. This is one of the few Modern Greek studies that use a comparable corpus in order to better understand the nature of the translation practice. The corpus analysed consists of Modern Greek popular science articles and is divided into two subcorpora: the translated language corpus and the non-translated language corpus. The study indicates that there is substantial evidence that Modern Greek articles employ some translation-specific features which are dependent on the source language, at least in terms of some passive voice features. More importantly, it suggests that the non-translated texts tend to be similar to the translated ones, which are in turn closer to the English source texts. Even though it is early to conclude that translation encourages the different usage of particular linguistic features in non-translated texts, the data provide indirect evidence that translation is a potential field of language contact with important consequences.
Keywords:
- corpus-based translation studies,
- passive voice,
- Modern Greek,
- popular science articles,
- comparable corpus
Résumé
Peu de recherches ont été menées jusqu’à présent sur les caractéristiques spécifiques de la traduction qui dépendent à la fois de la langue source et la langue cible. La présente étude vise à déterminer si les articles de vulgarisation scientifique traduits en grec moderne diffèrent de ceux qui sont rédigés originalement dans cette langue, de par une plus grande proximité avec la langue source, l’anglais, en ce qui a trait à la fréquence de la voix passive et à l’ordre des mots dans les constructions passives. Il s’agit de l’une des rares études portant sur le grec moderne qui utilise un corpus comparable afin de mieux comprendre la nature de la pratique de la traduction. Le corpus analysé est constitué d’articles de vulgarisation scientifique en grec moderne et est divisé en deux sous-corpus : le corpus traduit et le corpus non traduit. L’étude indique qu’il y a des preuves substantielles que les articles en grec moderne non traduits emploient certaines caractéristiques de traduction qui dépendent de la langue source, du moins en termes de certaines fonctionnalités de la voix passive. Plus important encore, l’étude suggère que les textes non traduits sont généralement semblables à ceux qui sont traduits, qui, à leur tour, sont plus proches des textes sources anglais. Même s’il est trop tôt pour conclure que la traduction encourage l’usage différent des particularités linguistiques des textes non traduits, les données fournissent des preuves indirectes que la traduction est un champ potentiel de contact de langues avec des conséquences importantes.
Mots-clés :
- études fondées sur l’analyse de corpus,
- voix passive,
- grec moderne,
- articles de vulgarisation scientifique,
- corpus comparable
Appendices
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