Introduction
Welcome to the CroCo project on linguistic properties of translated texts at Saarland University, Germany!
Executive Summary
Within the project funded by the German Research Foundation our team of linguists and computational linguists wants to find out more about explicitation, the assumed characteristic of translations making them seem clearer, more explicit than the matching originals.
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 CroCo project is an attempt to create a translation corpus for the language pair 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. Focussing on the phenomenon of explicitation, it investigates 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 are explanations in terms of language typology, text typology, and processes of understanding during the translation process. The investigation applies 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.
Project duration 2005 - 2010