Annotating Racism

A corpus-based study of cross-linguistic discourse annotation and analysis

Efe Mouka1
Ioannis E. Saridakis1
Aggeliki Fotopoulou2
Voula Giouli2
1
University of Athens,
2
Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP/Athena)

7th EST Congress: Germersheim

29 August - 1 September 2013
 Aims and Scope

●
Corpus annotation as a means of systematic lexico-
grammatical analysis of linguistic resources
●
Descriptive approach
●
Translation strategies and norms as a focal point in
translation corpora
●
Socio-cultural markedness in discourses of racism
●
Project aim: present problems and impediments during
annotation process
 Racism, Crisis, Discourse and Translation

●
Racism: a meaning that is expanded and evasive: no
commonly acknowledged defnition (Reislig & Wodak
2001:5)
●
Legitimisation of privileges and aggressions?
●
Discriminatory judgement encompassing evaluation of real
or fctitious biological diferences (Memmi 1992:103)
●
Heterophobia (Gr., ετεροφοβία - fear of the other): phobic and
aggressive atitudes designated and directed against others,
legitimised by diferent psychological, social or metaphysical
arguments (Memmi 1992:121)
 Racism, Crisis, Discourse and Translation

●
Practical behaviour (on the street, in the workplace, in institutions, etc.)
●
Political programme
●
Legal structure (citizenship conferred according to jus sanguinis)
●
Practical horizon of a state (e.g. projection of a 'clean race' or an
apartheid policy)
(Guillaumin 1991:164)

●
Racism is integrated into everyday situations through cognitive and
behavioural practices that activate underlying power relations (Essed
1991:52)
 Te Greek Crisis and the “Birth of a New Man”

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man Immigrants in a detainment camp, Greece
Salvador Dalí, 1943

Riots in Athens of the Crisis Homeless in Athens

 Te Greek Crisis and the “Birth of a New Man”

Leader of the 'Golden Dawn' Party

Front-page of Golden Dawn's magazine

(1989) From a 'Golden Dawn' event
 Racism and Translation in Cinema,
Corpus Description

●
Realistic flms represent discourses of racist stances
●
Cinema as widely accessible to the public refects society and communicates ideas
●
Subtitles are the most read translations and text types (Gotlieb 1997:153)
●
Racist discourse: an under-researched feld of study

Corpus (Movies)
●
Parallel trilingual corpus (EN-EL-ES), 5 movies, 09:05 hours
●
EN 51,000 / EL 29,700 / ES 35,900
●
Inter-racial relations
●
Contemporaneous
●
Realistic approach
●
Assumed racist discourse
 Text Normalisation and Processing
●
Video segmentation and orthographic transcription
●
Aligned and time-aligned corpus uterances
●
–-> TEI-conforming .xml document
<div>
- <u who="#SPK16">
  <anchor synch="#T835" />
  Who do you hate, Danny?
  <anchor synch="#T836" />
  </u>
- <spanGrp type="subtitles-el">
  <span from="#T835" to="#T836"> Ποιον μισείς, Ντάνι;</span>
  </spanGrp>
- <spanGrp type="subtitles-es">
  <span from="#T835" to="#T836">¿A quién odias, Danny?</span>
  </spanGrp>
  </div>
- <div>

●
Linguistic annotation, to isolate discourse type-specifc instances
●
Racist stances: expressed through emotions and/or opinions
 Corpus Annotation
●
Clause-level (extended units of meaning, Sinclair)
●
Isolation of negative instances (targeting persons of other ethnicities)
●
Appraisal Teory (Martin & White 2005)
Schema, GATE Platform
Annotation examples, in GATE
 Register Shifs - A Case in Point, in Subtitling

●
Under-researched area of study
●
Need to analyse shifs in terms of discourse tenor
(participants' role) (Halliday)
●
Socio-cognitive implications for the discourse feld (i.e. the
generalised perception of heterophobia and its modalities):
Cinematographic discourse vs. “general” societal atitudes
- a comparative approach
●
Linking such atitudes with translational norms and
practices: a retrodictive explanatory analysis (von Wright
1971; Chesterman 2008)
 Preliminary fndings

●
Translation Shifs [1]
●
And now some fucking Korean owns it who fred these guys and is making a killing because he hired 40 fucking
border jumpers
●
Τώρα το 'χει ένας Κορεάτης, που απέλυσε τους δικούς μας και θησαυρίζει επειδή προσέλαβε λαθρομετανάστες
(American History X, 1998)

{SketchEngine - enTenTen12, 4.65 bn tokens, June 2012; GkWaC, 150 mn tokens, 2007}

Lexical semantic elements and usage profle

(border jumper): illegal immigrant; Hispanic/Mexican origin (US); Judgement: neutral (+ prosody fucking); sub-
standard English (s. Teubert & Čermáková 2007: 65-66); 57 tokens (vs. 26,740 tokens: illegal immigrant)
(λαθρομετανάστης): illegal immigrant; no specifc origin; judgement: neutral (no prosody); standard Greek; 882 tokens
(vs. 106 tokens: παράνομος μετανάστης)

Clause semantics: negative judgement inferred from context of situation (and discourse) + meaning by collocation (see:
Léon 2005: 405-415) (contrastive relation (Fairclough 2003: 87-89) between δικούς μας [:our guys] and λαθρομετανάστες).
 Preliminary fndings

●
Translation Shifs [2]
●
I mean, Christ, Lincoln freed the slaves, what, like hundred and thirty years ago. How long does
it take to get your act together?
●
Ο Λίνκολν απελευθέρωσε τους σκλάβους πριν 130 χρόνια. Πόσον καιρό χρειάζεσαι για να
γίνεις άνθρωπος;
(American History X, 1998)

{SketchEngine - enTenTen12, 4.65 bn tokens, June 2012; GkWaC, 150 mn tokens, 2007}

Lexical semantic elements and usage profle

(get {one's} act together): to get oneself organized and on schedule; Judgement: negative/irony
(idiom); 7,707 tokens
(γίνομαι άνθρωπος): lit. to become human, ethical and useful citizen; Judgement: highly
negative/irony (idiom); 288 tokens
 Preliminary fndings

●
Translation Shifs [3]
●
We'll let the niggers, kikes and spics grab for their piece of the pie.
●
Dejemos que negros y latinos se lleven su parte.
(American History X, 1998)

{SketchEngine - enTenTen12, 4.65 bn tokens, June 2012}

Lexical semantic elements and usage profle

(kikes): Jews; Judgement: negative, slang; 1,083 tokens (omited in the ES trans)
(spics): Hispanic people; Judgement: negative, slang; appr. 740 tokens
(latinos): generic term describing Latin origin; Stance: neutral
(nigger): Black people; Judgement: negative, slang; 11,647 tokens
(negro): Black people; Stance: neutral
 Comparative Examples

Every night, thousands of these parasites stream across the border like some
fucking pinata exploded. [...] Tis is about your life and mine. It's about decent,
hard-working Americans falling through the cracks and geting the shaf because
their government cares more about the constitutional rights of a bunch of people
who aren't even citizens of this country. [...] We're losing our freedom so that a
bunch of fucking foreigners can come in here and exploit our country.
(American History X, 1998)
It is unacceptable to assimilate immigrants of Greek origin to every kind of
subhumans who have invaded our fatherland with the diseases that they lug
around. It is a shame! In the globalisation era it is unacceptable, that Greeks who
live abroad do not play a decisive role for what is happening in their country
contrary to every Ali Hasan, Abdhul or any other third-world crap, without having
served in the army and worn the honoured khaki, nor paying taxes to the state.
(Zaroulia, Parliamentary Speech, October 2012)
 Conclusions

●
Investigating translational norms in Greece and Spain
●
A model to detect racism-related uterances and
systematically categorise them
●
Appraisal Teory to isolate instances of racist atitude
●
Register shifs in translation, a model parallel to
Systemic Functional Linguistics
●
Aiming at an analysis of atitudes, using retrodictive
explanatory hypotheses
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