executive summary
Sponsor: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
Duration: 1 June 2005 - 31 May 2007
Acronym: CroCo (Cross-linguistic Corpora)
In spite of the emergence of world wide initiatives towards linguistically annotated and enriched corpora, translation studies research involving bilingual corpora continues to rely on raw data in many cases. In contrast, the project proposed here is an attempt to create a translation corpus for English - German, with data linguistically interpreted on several levels and larger coverage than currently available. Its main area of interest is the investigation of lexico-grammatical and textual properties of translated texts, using the examples of English and German. Focussing on the phenomenon of explicitation, it will investigate properties of translations which are due to the specifics of language combination and of the direction of translation on the one hand, and which are universal on the other, by being results of the translation process. A further area of work will be explanations in terms of language typology, text typology, and processes of understanding during the translation process. The investigation will apply both quantitative and qualitative methods. Our twofold aims are the creation and linguistic annotation of an electronic bilingual corpus, consisting of registerially comparable originals and translations in German and in English, in the first place, and the exploitation of this annotated corpus for an investigation of specific properties of translated texts on the other.