How English Triggers
Processes of Norm Variation in
Other European Languages
Juliane House
jhouse@uni-hamburg.de
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/fachbereiche-einrichtungen/sfb538
Structure
I
Project Background, Research
Questions and Hypotheses
II Analytical Procedure
and Analysis
III Some Results
1. The Project “Covert Translation”
Globalized communication leads to an ever
increasing demand for „parallel“ texts or covert
translations
Research question: whether and how English as a
global lingua franca influences German and other
languages through processes of parallel text
production and covert translation
Parallel texts
texts on comparable topics, which belong to
the same genre and fulfil the same function
Covert translation
the function which a source text has in its
discourse world is maintained in the
translation through the use of a "cultural
filter“ (House1977,1997), with which culturespecific source language norms are adapted
to the norms holding in the "receiving"
language community
The Impact of Global English
Traditional process of cultural filtering may
now be in a process of change!
Is maintenance of target culture norms in
parallel text production and covert
translation no longer operative such that
source and target norms are converging?
General assumptions
German (French, Spanish, later Persian,
Chinese) textual norms are adapted to
Anglophone ones
Adaptations can be located along a limited
set of dimensions of culturally determined,
empirically established communicative
preferences (e.g. preferred foci on
interpersonal or ideational function, on
informational vagueness or specificity)
The Project‘s Hypotheses
1. A shift from a conventionally strong
emphasis in German discourse on the
ideational function of language to an
Anglophone interpersonal orientation
focussing on addressee involvement.
2. A shift from a conventionally strong
emphasis on informational explicitness in
German texts to Anglophone inferenceinducing implicitness and propositional
opaqueness.
3. A shift in information structure from packing
lexical information densely and integratively
in German texts to presenting information in
a more loosely linearised, "sentential" way.
4. A shift in word order such that the German
“Satzklammer” with its two discontinuous
left and right parts gives way to more
continuous, juxtaposed positions of the two
parts.
The Corpus
about 650 texts (over 800 000 words)
Texts reflect a sphere of production and
reception which is of pervasive, global
socio-cultural influence
Covert Translation
Translation and Parallel Text Corpus
PARALLEL CORPUS
PRIMARY CORPUS
ENGLISH TEXTS
German
Translations
French Translations
Spanish Translations
GERMAN TEXTS
English
Translations
FRENCH TEXTS
SPANISH TEXTS
VALIDATION CORPUS
Interviews
Background Documentation
Translation- and Comparable Corpora
(Example: English-German)
Corpus
English-German originals and translations (French and Spanish
control texts)
Popular Science Texts
– Scientific American, New Scientist and their satellite journals
– Micro-diachronic: 1978-1982; 1999-2002
– 500 000 Words
Economic Texts
– Annual reports by internationally operating companies
Letters to shareholders, Missions, Visions, Corporate
statements
– Reverse Translation Relation: German-English, French/SpanishEnglish
– 130 000 Words
Method
Combination of qualitative and quantitative
methods
Qualitative: House Translation Evaluation
Model
Quantitative: Frequency Counts
Renewed qualitative analysis
Three Phases of Study
Phase 1: Qualitative Analyses
- Result: differences in subjectivity and addressee
orientation in originals and translations
Phase 2: Quantification
- Result: differences in frequency of linguistic means of expressing
subjectivity and addresssee orientation
Phase 3: Re-contextualising qualitative analyses: isolation of all
occurrences of vulnerable elements
- Manual annotation to locate co-occurences with e.g. tense, mood
- Do equivalent elements occur in same linguistic context?
- Are equivalent elements used for same communicative function?
- translation relation, genre-contrastive
Statistics: Multivariate analyses, complex co-occurrence patterns
Genres
Popular Science: articles from Scientific
American and National Geographic,
UNESCO Courier
(External) Business Communication:
annual reports, letters to shareholders,
„visions" and „missions", product
presentations
Computer Instructions: software manuals
Texts were scanned, transcribed, formated
and segmented according to orthographic
utterance units (sentences, paragraphs,
titles and subtitles must be recognisable)
Comparability: textual stretch functioning
as an introduction
2. Qualitative analytic procedure
House‘s (1997) translation model
Two functional components co-present in
every text: ideational & interpersonal that
need to be kept equivalent in translation
Source and target texts to be analysed in
terms of the levels of Language and Text,
Register and Genre. Outcome is as textual
profile and the text‘s function
Language, Register and Genre
Genre as content-plane of Register, and
Register as expression plane of Genre;
Register as content plane of Language,
Language as expression plane of Register
Function of a text: co-presence of two functional
components: an ideational and an interpersonal
one
Textual function NOT identical with functions of
language
Superordinate Features:
Field, Tenor and Mode
Field of Discourse: nature of the social action in
the text, field of activity, content, degree of
lexical generality and specificity
Tenor of Discourse: author and his personal
stance vis-à-vis the content, relationship
between author and addressees (social power,
distance, affect)
Mode of Discourse: cohesion, coherence,
degrees of "spokenness" and "writtenness"
Genre
A socially established category
characterised in terms of occurrence of
use, source and a communicative purpose
or any combination of these
Links a single text to a class of texts united
by a common communicative purpose
Reflects language users' shared
knowledge about nature of texts of the
same kind
A Scheme for Producing, Analysing and
Comparing Original and Translation Texts
Overt and covert translation
Covert translation: like a second original
Not marked pragmatically as a translation
May have been created in its own right
Translator creates equivalent speech event
through the use of a „cultural filter“
Cultural Filter
Functional equivalence in covert translation
achieved through changes on the levels of
Language/Text and Register
Text is adapted to target culture norms
Translator looks at source text ‚with the eyes'
of target text readers and acts accordingly
Most imortant are changes to a text‘s
interpersonal functional component for which
values along dimensions of Tenor and Mode
are crucial
Translators need reliable information about
culture-specific communicative
preferences drawn from contrastive
pragmatic discourse analyses
E.g. German speakers‘ tendency to
emphasise the ideational functional
component of texts, whereas English
speakers tend to give equal weight to the
interpersonal functional component
Analytical Process
1. Analysis of English original along the
dimensions Field, Tenor and Mode
- Setting up a text-profile on the basis of
analytical findings on lexical, syntactic
and textual levels that reflect the
individual textual function
2. Analysis of translation along the same
dimensions
3. Comparison of source and translation
3. Qualitative contrastive analyses
of English-German translations in
two genres
3.1 Popular science texts
English original texts
mostly taken from the popular scientific
magazine Scientific American
Addressees are interested lay readers
Specialised lexis is mostly absent in
English originals, texts are more „popular“
than „scientific“!
- German translations of these texts
appeared in the German satellite
publication Spektrum der Wissenschaft
- Higher level of technical, specialised
language in German texts
- Generally more explicit, translations give
etymological derivations, "unpack"
informational content, tend to provide
detailed explanations and interpretations.
(1) HIV Vaccines: Prospects and
Challenges, in: Scientific American,
Juli 1998/ Wie nahe ist ein HIVImpfstoff, (BT: How close is a HIV
vaccine) in: Spektrum der
Wissenschaft, Oktober 1998
Most vaccines activate what is called the
humoral arm of the immune system.
Die meisten Vakzine aktivieren den
sogenannten humoralen Arm des
Immunsystems (nach lateinisch humor,
Flüssigkeit)
(BT: Most vaccines activate the so-called
humoral arm of the immune system (after
Latin humor, liquid.)
(2) Gazzaniga, M., The Split Brain
Revisited, in: Scientific American
July 1998/ Rechtes und linkes
Gehirn: Split-Brain und
Bewußtsein, in: Spektrum der
Wissenschaft, Dezember 1998
(BT: Right and Left Brain: SplitBrain and Consciousness)
Groundbreaking work that began more than a quarter
of a century ago has led to ongoing insights about
brain organisation and consciousness.
Jahrzehntelange Studien an Patienten mit chirurgisch
getrennten Großhirnhälften haben das Verständnis für
den funktionellen Aufbau des Gehirns und das Wesen
des Bewußtseins vertieft.
(BT: Decade-long studies on patients with surgically
separated brain hemispheres have deepened the
understanding of the functional organisation of the
brain and the essence of consciousness.)
(3) Buchbinder, S., Avoiding
Infection after HIV-Exposure, in:
Scientific American July 1998 /
Prävention nach HIV-Kontakt, in:
Spektrum der Wissenschaft,
Oktober 1998 (BT: Prevention
after HIV-Contact)
Treatment may reduce the chance of contracting
HIV infection after a risky encounter.
Eine sofortige Behandlung nach Kontakt mit einer
Ansteckungsquelle verringert unter Umständen die
Gefahr, dass sich das Human-ImmunschwächeVirus im Körper festsetzt. Gewähr gibt es keine,
zudem erwachsen eigene Risiken.
(BT: An immediate treatment after contact reduces
under certain circumstances the danger that the
human immuno-deficiency-virus establishes itself in
the. There is no guarantee for this, moreover new
risks arise.)
“Didactic tenor“
of German translations
Translators may have assumed a lack of knowledge
on the part of the reader
In the English texts, the addressees are “drawn into
the text” to make them personally involved
Addressees of English texts are "invited" to identify
with the persons depicted in the text’s discourse
world through the use of various linguistic means
(4) Buchbinder, S., Avoiding
Infection after HIV Exposure, in:
Scientific American, July 1998/
Prävention nach HIV-Kontakt, in:
Spektrum der Wissenschaft,
Oktober 1998 (BT: Prevention
after HIV-Contact)
I
1 Suppose you are a doctor in an emergency
room
2 and a patient tells you she was raped two
hours earlier.
3 She is afraid she may have been exposed to
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS
4 but has heard that there is a "morning-after
pill" to prevent HIV infection.
II
1 Can you in fact do anything to block the virus
2 from replicating and establishing infection?
1 In der Notfallaufnahme eines Krankenhauses
berichtet eine Patientin
2 sie sei vor zwei Stunden vergewaltigt worden
3 und nun in Sorge, dem AIDS-Erreger
ausgesetzt zu sein,
4 sie habe aber gehört, es gebe eine "Pille
danach",
5 die eine HIV-Infektion verhüte.
6 Kann der Arzt überhaupt irgendetwas tun,
7 was eventuell vorhandene Viren hindern
würde,
8 sich zu vermehren und sich dauerhaft im
Körper einzunisten?
(BT: In the emergency room of a hospital a
patient reports that she had been raped two
hours ago and was now worrying that she
had been exposed to the AIDS-Virus. She
said she had heard that there was an "AfterPill", which might prevent an HIV-infection.
Can the doctor in fact do anything which
might prevent potentially existing viruses from
replicating and establishing themselves
permanently in the body?)
English texts
„Mental processes“ are used to establish a
personal relationship with the addressee
A text‘s Field is made familiar to addressees
Further linguistic means: mood switches,
dramatisation of scientific reports
Strong cohesion through extensive use of
repetition, structural parallelism, linguistic
routines, deliberate ‚framing‘ of a text
German texts
Feature only relational and material processes
(in the sense of Halliday) in different distributions
Lack of mental processes
No offer of identification to addressees
Syntactically more complex structures (left
branching pre-nominal modification, absence of
rhetorical mechanisms such as parallelism)
Less macro-cohesive, more „micro-organized“
Summary of Findings
Reduced emotional engagement in German texts
Less persuasive attitude
Reduced conviction on the part of the text
producer that scientific research is successful
Generally more "neutral" lexis
Fewer "emotive" connotations and intensifiers
More negative connotations
Orientation towards persons reduced in favour of
orientation towards institutions, things, concepts,
abstract phenomena
3.2. Economic Texts
“Missions" and "visions“, letters to shareholders
In English texts: simple colloquial style with few
specialised economic terminology
Routinised lexical phrases reminiscent of
advertisements
Positive connotations, comparatives, superlatives,
intensifiers,
Optimistic, consistently positive, often enthusiastic
self-presentation of companies and their agents
Heavy use of personal deixis as identification
anchors
In German texts all these features less pronounced!
(5) Multisyn Vision 2000
Connected Creativity
1 I want to be part of a company where I am challenged to:
2 - Have fun creating new ideas that improve our performance in the market
3 - Obsessively search for new ideas, by observing, listening and learning
from everyone
Connected Creativity
1 Ich will Teil eines Unternehmens sein, das mich herausfordert:
2 - Mit Spaß neue Ideen zu kreieren, die unsere Performance am Markt
verbessern
3 - Intensive neue Ideen zu suchen durch beobachten, zuhören und lernen
von jedem
(BT: I want to be part of a company which challenges me:
- with fun to create new ideas, which improve our performance in the market
- to look for intensive new ideas through observing, listening and learning
from everyone.)
Single-minded passion for winning
1 I want to be part of a company where I am challenged to:
2 - Have unrelentingly high expectations of myself and others
3 - Say "No" to anything that is not clearly aligned with the
winning strategy
Single-minded passion for winning
1 Ich will Teil eines Unternehmens sein, das mich
herausfordert:
2 - Hohe Erwartungen an mich und andere zu stellen
3 - "Nein" zu sagen, zu allem, was nicht klar mit der
Gewinnenwollen-Strategie verbunden ist
(BT: I want to be part of a company which challenges me to
- put high expectations onto me and others
- say "No" to everything that is not clearly connected with the
Want-to-win Strategy.)
Summary of Qualitative Analysis of
Texts in Two Genres
None of our hypotheses confirmed
But: indication of a shift in the use of those
linguistic means which realise the
interpersonal functional component („stance“,
„expressivity“, „point of view“, addressee
orientation)
First signs of adaptation processes of German
to Anglo-American textual norms (genremixing)
Rapprochement to Anglophone textual
norms expressed in a stronger presence
of "subjectivity" and "addressee
orientation” – to be examined under the
dimension TENOR and its subcategories
Stance and Social Role Relationship,
Social Attitude and Participation
“Subjectivity”
A speaker’s ability to represent and constitute
himself in and through language as a
“subject”
Related in systemic-functional theory to
Stance (Biber 2004):
- "epistemic stance" relating to the speaker’s
assessment of the truth of the proposition
- "attitudinal stance" referring to the author’s
personal attitude, his value judgements and
expectations
Hunston & Thompson (2001):
subjectivity examined under the category of
"evaluation" consisting of "stance" and
"viewpoint" vis à vis the proposition
Smith (2002, 2003):
two types of subjectivity:
(1) "point of view" (linguistic units expressing
a way of looking at things) and
(2) "perspective" ('perspectivising' utterances
that present a situation or state of affairs from
a certain standpoint)
But subjectivity can also be said to relate to
the function certain linguistic means have
when it comes to influencing hearers (Smith
2003; Nuyts 2001): interactive function,
“Intersubjectivity”
Similar labels are Epistemic Modality (Salkie
2002; Facchinetti et al. 2003), Emotive
Prosody (Bublitz 2003), Evidentiality (Chafe &
Nichols 1986), Metadiscourse (Le 2004,
Hyland 1998, Hyland & Tse 2004), as well as
“politeness in text” (House 1998, 2005)
4. Diachronic qualitative analyses
Popular science:
contrastive analyses of English originals,
German translations and German originals:
two time frames 1978-1982 and 1999-2002
Differences found in the following areas:
(1) Description of Content
Older German translations more explicitly
structured (use of temporal adverbials,
conditional and causal conjunctions,
advance organizers (lists)
(2) Personalising Science
Older English texts:
- more sentence adverbials
- more complement constructions
- more evaluative lexis
- more process-oriented verbs
- more speaker-hearer deixis)
- lexical und syntactic parallelism
Differences much less marked in second
time frame 1999-2002!
Addressee-orientation through presence of
speaker-hearer deixis, material and mental
processes; simulated interaction between
author and addressees via mood switches;
colloquial lexis, expressions of modality
(3) Explicitation
Older German translations:
explicitations particularly on meta-level via
text commenting devices ("Es muss an dieser
Stelle betont werden“ BT: It must be stressed
at this point) as well as explanations (didactic
function).
Newer German translations:
addressees' knowledge often presupposed,
however still: systematic enrichment with
additional details
Diachronic Qualitative Analyses of
Economic Texts
Increasing difficulties with finding translations
of corporate statements - English only!!
Changes over time with respect to the
following phenomena related to subjectivity
and addressee orientation:
Mood
Newer letters to shareholders: increased use
of interrogatives and imperatives (effect:
simulated interaction between author and
addressee
Striking: linkage of imperatives with direct
address of readers, often with requests,
warning, threat, announcements
Modality
Modal verbs preferably used in final
paragraphs (announcements of further
action, Böttger & Bührig 2003)
Narrative Sequences
Much greater frequency in newer texts
Narratives replace Reports and
Descriptions (Böttger & Probst 2001)
5. Validating qualitative analyses
Translations from English into French and
Spanish to validate results of analyses of
English-German translations
French translations of popular science
texts
Fewer expressions of Subjectivity than in the
English and German texts due to:
- fewer particles and colloquial forms
- preference of metaphorical instead of
congruent constructions, of literal rather than
figurative forms
- frequent shift of perspective from author or
addressee to a third person
Lack of involvement of addressees:
- lack of mental processes and hearer deixis
- no offer of identification to readers
- absence of narrative frames and coordinating conjunctions – that indicated an
adaptation to Anglophone norms in the
German translations
Spanish translations of economic texts
Sentences with active constructions in
English often changed into passives
Paratactic structures favoured in English
often transformed into hypotactic structures in
Spanish
Fewer narrative sequences in Spanish
Higher degree of formality in addressing
readers and in choice of lexis
German translations thus tend to be much
closer to their English originals than
French and Spanish ones, i.e., no
confirmation of an equivalent influence of
English norms on native French and
Spanish norms!
6. Quantitative Diachronic Analyses
To verify the results of the qualitative
analyses
To reveal preferred usage of salient individual
forms with respect to collocations and cooccurrence patterns in the texts
Subjectivity and adressee orientation
operationalized as occurrences of:
modal verbs, semi-modals, modal words,
particles, mental processes, deixis,
connective particles, sentence adverbials,
ing-adverbials, progressive aspect,
sentential mood, complement constructions,
‘frames’, commenting parentheses,
evaluative lexis
(distribution and frequency examined in
comparative diachronic analysis)
Data Basis (Popular Science)
English monolingual texts from the years 19992002 (122866 words).
The German translations of these English texts
(113420 words).
German monolingual texts from the years 19992002 (100648 words).
English monolingual texts from the years 19781982 (42497 words).
The German translations of these English texts
(37830 words).
German monolingual texts from the years 19781982 (82480 words).
Quantitative analyses have by and large
confirmed qualitative analyses
Change in frequency of those linguistic means
that contribute to realising subjectivity and
addressee orientation in both German
translations and original German texts
Increased frequency In German texts of
speaker-hearer deixis, elements expressing
modality, particles, mental processes - all of
which signal subjectivity and addressee
orientation and construe orality and interaction
between author and addressee
But: different path in German translations and
German original texts: rapprochement to
English texts appears to be slower in original
German texts!
Major results of quantitative analyses:
(1) Deixis
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
E
DÜ
D
1978-1982
1999-2002
(2) Modality
Particles
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Modal words
DÜ
D
1978-1982 1999-2002
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
DÜ
D
1978-1982 1999-2002
(3) Mental Processes
150
E
100
DÜ
50
D
0
1978-1982
1999-2002
(4) Connectivity
And / Und
Pronominal adverbials
8
E
6
DÜ
D
4
2
0
1978-1982
1999-2002
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
E
DÜ
D
1978-1982
1999-2002
Modified hypothesis
Changes in German text conventions
through contact with English texts take
place through register-specific variation of
the use of certain linguistic means, which
are reflected in a changed function of the
text as a whole
7. Cause and Effect? Three
explanatory hypotheses
Cause and effect? What exactly causes the
changes found? Three explanatory hypotheses:
Changes through translation from English as a
locus of direct language contact !
Changes through omnipresence of global
English, i.e. translation as a locus of indirect
language contact !
Translation is innocent! Translators conserve
norms of target language!
The Booh Factor:
Translation as Mediator of the
English Take-Over
Translational process effects change!
The X Factor:
Universal Impact of Globalisation
Translational process reflects change!
The Green Factor:
Translation as Cultural
Conservation
Translational process resists change!