A Contrastive Study of Deontic Modality in Parallel Texts

This article is a contrastive study of deontic modal markers in three parallel texts. It analyses the modality system in the English, Russian and French texts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights accounting for the ambiguity of some English modal verbs in legal texts and the difficulty in rendering them into a different language. The research reveals modal markers used to express deontic permission, deontic obligation and deontic prohibition in the three parallel texts; semantic similarities and discrepancies between these modal markers; and translation strategies employed to render the English modal markers into Russian and French. The article responds to the need for a systematic analysis of deontic modal markers in English, Russian and French due to the semantic and syntactic differences among the German, Romance and Slavic languages. The article concludes that French and Russian have more in common than French and English or Russian and English in terms of the deontic modality.

Tocharian B santse ‘daughter-in-law’

In Ogihara’s edition of the Tocharian B so-called “Avadāna-Manuscript”, a fragment from the Dhanika-Avadāna contains a word santse. On the basis of parallel texts, it is shown that santse means ‘daughter-in-law’. This newly identified word is cognate with a.o. Greek νυός ‘daughter-in-law’ and derives from Proto-Indo- European *snusó-.

The frame system as an interlingual representation for parallel texts

One of the key problems in comparative studies based on frame semantics is the question whether frames can become an interlingua. This paper argues that not only single frames, but their systems or frame semantic domain representations consisting of frames and their relations are also useful in comparative studies. Such a system of frames helps one explain why seemingly unrelated expressions in different languages find a common denominator in higher-order frames, thus becoming semantic-pragmatic equivalents. To support this argument, an analysis of Polish, English and German lease agreements as parallel texts is conducted and the benefits of this approach to comparative studies are presented. The study is in line with the recent FrameNet initiatives, such as the Global FrameNet and automatic translation studies. However, it differs in some methodological aspects. Instead of using FrameNet as the given lexical resource, domain specific frames are defined starting from common general concepts of the analyzed semantic domain. A text-based approach rather than a comparison of bi-sentences or phrases is adapted. The work thus introduces a new approach to comparative studies based on frame semantics and frame semantic research. It also follows the recent research trend of adding a pragmatic dimension to frame semantic analysis by analyzing frames in context.

Investigating the Use of Translation Continuation Tasks in Commercial Translation Teaching: A Study on Translating User Manuals

Based on the xu-argument, this study investigated the use of translation continuation tasks in commercial translation instruction. Forty-four second-year Business English majors at a Chinese university participated in the study. They were divided into equal-sized control and experimental groups. Members of the experimental group were asked to read Chinese-English parallel texts from a user manual, while those of the control group were asked to read the Chinese text only. Subsequently, both groups were required to translate the continued Chinese text into English. The results indicated the following: 1) the experimental group’s translated text was of significantly higher quality than that of the control group; and 2) the experimental group’s translations were well-aligned with the original text in their use of terminology, sentence structure, and stylistic features. The study concludes by suggesting that translation continuation tasks can improve commercial translation instruction and hence should be further applied in practice.

Do Mark 7:1–23 and Matthew 15:1–20 condone the unusual practices of New Prophetic Pentecostal Churches?

The leaders of certain New Prophetic Pentecostal Churches (NPPCs) perform rituals that are very unusual when compared with traditional church rituals and practices. These practices include eating grass, rats or snakes, drinking petrol and spraying Doom on people so that they would be healed and be closer to God. The trend to perform these unusual rituals has spread throughout South Africa. Leaders from NPPCs often quote Mark 7:14–19 and Matthew 15:10–11, 16–18 to justify their actions. In this study, these parallel texts will be considered in their literary and socio-cultural contexts to determine whether or not they can be taken to condone the activities of these church leaders.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The study will find that Mark 7:14–19 and Matthew 15:10–11, 16–18 either condone or do not condone the unusual activities of NPPCs and their leaders. Either way, the findings will be relevant for New Testament studies, practical theology, religion studies and systematic theology.

Performing Multilingual Analysis With Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015). An Equivalence Study of Four Languages

Today, there is a range of computer-aided techniques to convert text into data. However, they convey not only strengths but also vulnerabilities compared to traditional content analysis. One of the challenges that have gained increasing attention is performing automatic language analysis to make sound inferences in a multilingual assessment setting. The current study is the first to test the equivalence of multiple versions of one of the most appealing and widely used lexicon-based tools worldwide, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015). For this purpose, we employed supervised learning in a classification problem and computed Pearson's correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients on a large corpus of parallel texts in English, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. Our findings suggested that LIWC2015 is a valuable tool for multilingual analysis, but within-language standardization is needed when the aim is to analyze texts sourced from different languages.

“Acting in Accordance with the Ordinary Legislative Procedure…”: Metadiscourse in EU Regulations on Immigration

The ongoing Pan-European integration process has profoundly influenced the nature of European law and its development, demanding a review of “the ways of how language […] is materialized” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192). EU multilingualism is thus becoming an intricate concept since “EU translation is […] becoming the language of Europe” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192) encompassing a supranational view of the world conveyed in EU-wide legislation. Very much in line with this assumption, and taking into account the teaching experience in Specialised Translation Masters’ courses training would-be professional translators, this study examines a corpus of European Parliament Regulations on immigration. In order to understand whether dissimilarities and/or congruencies occur between the EU working language, i.e., English, and the Italian versions, the metadiscourse framework by Hyland (2005), comprising both interactive and interactional features, is used as the point of departure for the analysis of parallel texts. The Regulations produced by EU institutions and conveyed and transmitted both in English as a “procedural language” (Wagner, Bech, & Martίnez, 2012) as well as in Italian have been scrutinized both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to draw precious pedagogical implications for translation studies and professional practice for future qualified and trained translators.

Kelantan and Sarawak Malay Dialects: Parallel Dialect Text Collection and Alignment Using Hybrid Distance-Statistical-Based Phrase Alignment Algorithm

Parallel texts corpora are essential resources especially in translation and multilingual information retrieval. However, the publicly available parallel text corpora are limited to certain types and domains. Besides, Malay dialects are not standardized in term of writing. The existing alignment algorithms that is used to analayze the writing will require a large training data to obtain a good result. The paper describes our methodology in acquiring a parallel text corpus of Standard Malay and Malay dialects, particularly Kelantan Malay and Sarawak Malay. Second, we propose a hybrid of distance-based and statistical-based alignment algorithm to align words and phrases of the parallel text. The proposed approach has a better precision and recall than the state-of-the-art GIZA++. In the paper, the alignment obtained were also compared to find out the lexical similarities and differences between SM and the two dialects.

Google/Yandex Translation Detection in the Patterns Identifying System of Multilingual Texts

The object of this work is to develop a script for evaluating the ability of online translators to translate text from one language to another. For this purpose, we used Google Translate and Yandex.Translate. Examples from English, Kazakh and Russian languages were used for the analysis of 147 news items and about 1800 sentences. The texts are taken from an Internet resource astana.gov.kz. A corpus of parallel texts for three languages has been created. We used development for the “sentence” pattern with the prospect of further development for the “text” pattern. We analyzed errors in the following categories: untranslated/omitted words, extra words, incorrect word endings, incorrect word order, punctuation errors, mutilate translation and incorrect translation. Based on the analysis of the obtained data we have concluded that it is better to do the translation of the Russian text into Kazakh or English in the YandexTranslate than in Google Translate. The developed comparison script and error analysis script are available on the Internet in open access.