Academic Scientific JournalsTranslating a pandemic: A corpus study of COVID-19 multi-word terminology in EU press releases
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2020.4.01Keywords:
COVID-19, terminology, translation techniques, EU translation, institutionalization, terminological variationAbstract
The study employs a parallel English-Polish corpus to investigate how COVID-19 multi-word terms are handled in translations of EU press releases. Translation techniques are examined at four levels of analysis: (1) term variation, (2) institutionalization, (3) domestication/foreignization, and (4) degree of transfer of information. The results are discussed in regard to the characteristics of COVID-19 terminology and its, often neological, instability, which manifests itself in high levels of terminological variation, inconsistent use of recommended institutional equivalents, and varied degrees of information transfer between SL and TL. The findings are also reviewed in light of the nature of press releases which, as an essential link in the transmission of knowledge from EU institutions to citizens, prompt the use of domesticating techniques.
Downloads
References
Biel, Łucja (2009). “Organization of background knowledge structures in legal language and related translation problems”. Comparative Legilinguistics: International Journal for Legal Communication 1: 176–189.
Biel, Łucja (2014). Lost in the Eurofog: The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Biel, Łucja (2017). “Quality in institutional EU translation: Parameters, policies and practices”. In: Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel, Krzysztof Łoboda (eds.). Quality Aspects in Institutional Translation. Berlin: Language Science Press, 31–57.
Biel, Łucja (2020). “Eurolects and EU legal translation”. In: Meng Ji, Sara Laviosa (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–25.
Biel, Łucja, Agnieszka Biernacka, Anna Jopek-Bosiacka (2018). “Collocations of terms in EU competition law: A corpus analysis of EU English collocations”. In: Silvia Marino, Łucja Biel, Martina Bajčić, Vilelmini Sosoni (eds.). Language and Law: The Role of Language and Translation in EU Competition Law. Springer, 249–274.
Biel, Łucja, Dariusz Koźbiał (2020). “How do translators handle (near-)synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology”. Estudios de Traducción 10: 69–90.
Bielsa, Esperança (2005). “Globalisation and translation: A theoretical approach”. Language and Intercultural Communication 5/2: 131–144.
Cabré, M. Teresa (2010). “Terminology and translation”. In: Yves Gambier, Luc van Doorslaer (eds.). Handbook of Translation Studies. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 356–365.
Carter, Ronald (1999). “Common language: Corpus, creativity and cognition”. Language and Literature 8/3: 195–216.
Catenaccio, Paola (2008). “Press releases as a hybrid genre: Addressing the informative/promotional conundrum”. Pragmatics 18/1: 9–31.
Chaplin, Steve (2020). “COVID‐19: a brief history and treatments in development”. Prescriber 31/5: 23–28.
Cierpich-Kozieł, Agnieszka (2020). “Koronarzeczywistość – o nowych złożeniach z członem korona- w dobie pandemii”. Język Polski 4. Available at https://jezyk-polski.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Artyku%C5%82-Cierpich-Koziel.pdf. Accessed 26.10.2020.
Costa-Sánchez, Carmen, Xosé López-García (2020). “Comunicación y crisis del coronavirus en España. Primeras lecciones”. El Profesional de la Información 29/3: e290304.
Delavigne, Valérie (2017). “Term usage and socioterminological variation: The impact of social and local issues on the movement of terms”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 31–56.
Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission (2015).
DGT Translation Quality Guidelines. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/translation/maltese/guidelines/documents/dgt_translation_quality_guidelines_en.pdf. Accessed 08.09.2020.
Drouin, Patrick, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (2017). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (2020). COVID19 situation update worldwide, as of 26 October 2020. Available at https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019-ncov-cases. Accessed 26.10.2020.
European Commission. The Press Corner. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/home/en. Accessed 07.09.2020.
Faber, Pamela (2009). “The cognitive shift in terminology and specialized translation”. MonTi: Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación 1: 107–134.
Fernández-Silva, Sabela, Koen Kerremans (2011). “Terminological variation in source texts and translations: A pilot study”. Meta 56/2: 318–335.
Freixa, Judit (2002). La Variació terminològica: Anàlisi de la variació denomitiva en textos de different grau d’especialització de l’àrea de medi ambient. Barcelona: Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada/ Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Freixa, Judit, Sabela Fernández-Silva (2017). “Terminological variation and the unsaturability of concepts”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 155–180.
Goniewicz, Krzysztof, Amir Khorram-Manesh, Attila J. Hertelendy, Mariusz Goniewicz, Katarzyna Naylor, Frederick M. Burkle Jr. (2020). “Current response and management decisions of the European Union to the COVID-19 outbreak: A review”. Sustainability 12/9, 3838. Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/9/3838/htm. Accessed 09.09.2020.
Hejwowski, Krzysztof (2004). Kognitywno-komunikacyjna teoria przekładu. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Humbley, John, Aurélie Picton (2017). “Multiple perspectives on terminological variation”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1–10.
Interactive Terminology for Europe (2020). COVID-19 Terminology Available in IATE (Data as of 28/07/2020). Available at https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/covid-19-multili ngual-terminology-on-iate/resource/44522e37-6b1e-40be-aae2-9 4d5ca2b8e13. Accessed 12.10.2020.
Jakubíček, Miloš, Adam Kilgariff, Vojtěch Kovář, Pavel Rychlý, Vít Suchomel (2013). “The TenTen corpus family”. 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL, 125–127.
Kerremans, Koen (2017). “Towards a resource of semantically and contextually structured term variants and their translations”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 83–108.
Kilgariff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, Vít Suchomel (2014). “The Sketch Engine: ten years on”. Lexicography 1: 7–36.
Lassen, Inger (2006). “Is the press release a genre? A study of form and content”. Discourse Studies 8/4: 503–530.
León-Araúz, Pilar (2017). “Term and concept variation in specialized knowledge dynamics”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 213– 258.
Lawson, Robert (2020). “Coronavirus has led to an explosion of new words and phrases – and that helps us cope”. The Conversation. Available at https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-has-led-toan-explosion-of-new-words-and-phrases-and-that-helps-us-cope136909. Accessed 09.09.2020.
Maybin, Janet, Joan Swann (2007). “Everyday creativity in language: Textuality, contextuality, and critique”. Applied Linguistics 28/4: 497–517.
Molina, Lucía, Amparo Hurtado Albir (2002). “Translation techniques revisited: A dynamic and functionalist approach”. Meta: Translators’ Journal 47/4: 498–512.
Mori, Laura (2018). Observing Eurolects: Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Variation in EU Law. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, Ingrid, Jie Zhang, Jia Li (2020). “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic”. Multilingua 39/5: 503–515.
Pimentel, Janine (2017). “Specialized verbs and specialized uses of verbs in a comparable corpus of judgments produced in Canada, Portugal, and Brazil”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 109–130.
Prieto Ramos, Fernando, Albert Morales (2019). “Terminological innovation and harmonization at international organizations: Can too many cooks spoil the broth?”. In: Marita Kristiansen, Ingrid Simonnaes (eds.). Legal Translation: Current Issues and Challenges in Research, Methods and Applications. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 87–110.
Rossi, Micaela (2017). “Terminological metaphors and the nomadism of specialized terms: Some observations on intralinguistic and interlinguistic variation”. In: Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley, Aurélie Picton (eds.). Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 181–212.
Seracini, Francesca L. (2020). “Phraseology in multilingual EU legislation: A corpus-based study of translated multi-word terms”. Perspectives. DOI: 10.1080/0907676X.2020.1800058.
Sękowska, Elżbieta (2002). “Neologizmy słowotwórcze we współczesnej polszczyźnie (wybrane tendencje)”. Eslavística Complutense 4: 1–9.
Shelov, Sergey D. (2018). Ocherk teorii terminologii: Sostav, ponyatiynaya organizatsiya, prakticheskiye prilozheniya. Moscow: V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Sosoni, Vilelmini, John O’Shea (2020). “Translating property law terms: an investigation of Greek notarial deeds and their English translations”. Perspectives. DOI: 10.1080/0907676X.2020.1797840.
Strouther, Danielle (2020). “The remote working challenges digital businesses face after COVID-19. Search Engine Journal. Available at https://www.searchenginejournal.com/remote-working-challenges/371448/#close. Accessed 02.10.2020.
Tomaszewska, Aleksandra, Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau (2020). “COVID-19 multi-word terminology in EU press releases: Data”. RepOD, V1. Available at https://doi.org/10.18150/DU8D8Z. Accessed 01.11.2020.
Weston, Martin (1991). An English Reader's Guide to the French Legal System. New York, Oxford: Berg.
World Health Organization (2020). WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID19) Pandemic. Available at https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019. Accessed 26.10.2020.
Zhang, Jie, Yuqin Wu (2020). “Providing multilingual logistics communication in COVID-19 disaster relief”. Multilingua 39/5: 517–528.
