ENG409

Interdisciplinary
Approach to
English Studies

192012 Cheung Pak Him, Jerry

192027 Kwok Timothy Hei Long
 Table of contents

01 Introduction

02 Overview of
Translation Studies
03 Translation
Studies &
Interdisciplinarity
04 Corpus-based
Translation
Studies
01

Introduction
Introduction
This presentation explores the idea of interdisciplinarity of Translation
Studies in the following texts:

Chapter 1, Border Crossings Translation Studies and other disciplines by Yves

Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer

P291-301, Introducing Translation Studies Theories and Applications by

Jeremy Munday
Overview of Translation Studies
Translation Studies as a Polydiscipline
● Translation Studies (TS) begins with the input of other disciplines
● Which the scholars call for
→ linguistics, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics, semiotic
aesthetics, poetics, stylistics, philosophy, comparative literature etc.
● Being pollinated by different existing disciplines
→ TS becomes a “Polydiscipline”
Overview of Translation Studies
Evolution of Professional Translator
● In the 19th century, translators were rather “multiprofessional”
● Apart from translation, they worked as other roles
→ E.g. journalists, teachers, priests, writers, medical doctors etc.
→ Altruistic tasks: newspaper editing, book publishing, being
activist in social movement etc.
→ Women translators: engaged in women and workers rights etc.
● “Mono-professionalism” in translation only reaches the current
level in the last 50-70 years
Overview of Translation Studies
Conceptualization of Translation: Holmes’ map of “Translation Studies”
Overview of Translation Studies
Conceptualization of Translation
● Translation conceptualized into process, product,
social-cultural event, and network of agents
● Translation Studies are classified (Holmes’ map)
→ “Pure” studies on translation, and “Applied” studies
● “Pure” one mainly focuses on the more theoretical aspects of
translation studies (the orientation, restrictions)
● “Applied” one focuses on rather practical aspects (training,
aids like online translation)
Overview of Translation Studies
Development of Translation Studies
● In the 80s, Translation Studies expanded in a high speed
→ Increasing number of translation programmes, and signs of
institutionalization (books, research journals, conferences etc.)
● Snell-Hornby (1988): Translation Studies as a rather
“independent discipline”
● It utilizes relevant concepts from other disciplines
● But not being their subdivisions/branches
Overview of Translation Studies
Translation Studies as a “Turn”
● Cultural turn of the 80s
→ E.g. empirical, pragmatic, post-colonial etc.
● Acts as a turn, does not mean the TS shifts into another direction
or another discipline
● But rather a new perspective of TS (new angle to see TS)
● “Turn”of TS acts as a fashion
● As it attracts an increasing number of researchers in the 80s
Overview of Translation Studies
Sub-discipline to Inter-discipline
● In less than 20 years (70s-90s), TS has
grown from a sub-discipline to an
inter-discipline
● TS required different key elements and
disciplines to explain and understand
E.g. Growth of cognitive TS due to the
borrowing from other discipline, linguistics,
cognitive science.
TS and Interdisciplinarity
What is a Discipline?
● Scholarly, it can be defined as as a set of theoretical claims,
assumptions, and operational norms
● Can also be defined as a set of practical rules
→ Exchange of experience/knowledge between members of that
certain discipline
● Discipline also possesses its own community, with the experts in
it
● It is not the universal category
● It does not last forever
TS and Interdisciplinarity
TS as a Discipline
● A discipline requires identification;
→ Demarcating the border of the discipline
● and problematization
→ Discerning the problems experienced in the discipline, in relation
to practices and social needs
● TS as a discipline
→ It discerns, identifies, questions the problem of translation
TS and Interdisciplinarity
Importation to Discipline
● Discipline can’t stand alone, it needs other disciplines to exist
● Requires elements imported from other disciplines
= cultural transfer
● The concepts, models, methods, tools of other disciplines are
imported
● Discipline is always open to the related disciplines to a certain
extent
● Defined as a Polydiscipline
Corpus-based Translation Studies
- 1980s: John Sinclair and his team → the approach drawing on
the tools and techniques of monolingual corpus linguistics

- The ‘corpus-based approach’ known as being a ‘new standard

in translation studies’

- The evolution of computer systems = possibility of creating

electronic ’corpus’ of natural texts
- use software for processing and analysis → investigate the
use and patterns of word-forms in corpus
- example: aConCorde →Multilingual concordance tool
Corpus-based Translation Studies
- Reason why language researcher used computer
corpora: guarantee the quality of linguistic
evidence

- The concept of typicality: relevant to norms, laws

and universals (Baker, 1993, 1995)
- focus on identifying typicality of translated texts
→ compare to non-translated language
- Translation features: explicitation, grammatical
standardization, more frequent use of common
words
 Types of corpus & uses
- Bernardini et al. (2003) : summarized corpus types &
their uses
1. Monolingual corpora:
- Collections of texts in the same language
- Analysed → identify features of genre, writing style
and word formation
- Check naturalness
- Example: British National Corpus on English
(sometimes serve as representative
reference corpora)
 Types of corpus & uses
- 2. Comparable bilingual corpora
- collections of similar STs in the two languages
- example: document on solar panel technology
written in German and English

3. Parallel corpora
- ST-TT pairs (sentence by sentence/ paragraph by paragraph)
- Allowing learners or researchers for comparison of features
of texts under the constraint of translation with “original”
texts in both languages
- Example: Linguee, MyMemory, OPUS, Canadian Hansard
 Types of corpus & uses
- Olohan & Baker (2000): The University of Manchester’s
Translational English Corpus (TEC) vs fiction sub-corpus of
British National Corpus (BNC)
- Study on examining the use of “that”, in terms of frequency
- Findings:
- more frequent omission of conjunction along with
contradiction in BNC
- more occurance with contradictions in TEC
Corpus-based Translation Studies
- Quick access to quantitative data + deep critical analysis
→ complementary interdisciplinary methodology
- Limitations: computer’s ability of generating results
computer’s permission of certain interpretations
- Johansson (2003) → English-Norwegian parallel corpus
- difficulty: collect suitable texts for multi-corpora
- suggestion: examine multiple translations on the same text
by professional translators → study variations
 Case Studies
- Examples of corpus-based translation studies and audiovisual
translation as scenarios → how these affect translation
studies’ theory and applications
- Case study 1: Semantic prosody or association in Spanish and
English (examples from Leeds Collection of Internet corpora &
Spanish Real Academia Corpus): ”loom large” & “cernerse”
- to contrast the languages → allows lexicographers and
translators to apply
- conclusion: non-mainstream translation studies approach
Thanks!
 References
Gambier, Yves and Luc van Doorslaer (2016) ‘Disciplinary Dialogues with Translation Studies:
The Background Chapter’. In Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds) Border
Crossings: Translation Studies and Other Disciplines, Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company, 1-22.

Munday, Jeremy, Pinto, Sara Ramos and Jacob Blakesley(2022) Introducing Translation Studies:
Theories and Applications. Fifth edition. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York:
Routledge, 291-301.