What is kept and what is lost without translation? A corpus-assisted discourse study of the European Parliament’s original and translated English

ABSTRACT

In July 2011, the European Parliament (EP) stopped providing a written translation of its proceedings. Some years later, it seems apposite to look back and ask: What is kept and what is lost without the EP translating? To answer this question, the present paper adopts the first (modern diachronic) corpus-assisted discourse analysis study (MD-CADS) carried out within translation studies by drawing on the discourse-historical approach (DHA) and corpus linguistics (CL) tools. Hence, along DHA lines, the paper proceeds from texture through strategies to content by focusing on CL key keywords and detailed consistency. It performs analysis upon the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus archive, compiled at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). This study shows that MD-CADS is a potential source of data for triangulation with other, more qualitative, approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• translation
• MD-CADS
• DHA
• CL
• European Parliament

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

María Calzada-Pérez is full professor of translation studies at the Universitat Jaume I. Her research focuses on corpus-based translation studies, institutional translation (especially translation at the European Parliament), translation paedagogy, ideology and advertising. She is principal coordinator of the European Comparable and Parallel Corpora of Parliamentary Speeches research group. She has produced books and papers.

ORCID

María Calzada Pérez http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0830-4837

Notes

1 See, for example, http://www.eutrio.be/language-europe-translation, http://cdt.europa.eu/CDT%20Publication%20Book/The%20language%20of%20Europe%20-%20Translating%20for%20the%20EU/THE%20LANGUAGE%20OF%20EUROPE.pdf

2 The ECPC archive is freely available to the academic community at http://ecpc.xtrad.uji.es/glossa/html/index.php?corpus=ecpc. Note that the website is currently under construction.

3 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/debates-video.html

4 http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-cobuild/coercive%20measures

5 http://eurovoc.europa.eu/drupal/?q=search&text=strategy&cl=en&page=1

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-39289) and the Universitat Jaume I (P1.1B2012-64).