STANCE BUNDLES IN ENGLISH-TO-POLISH TRANSLATION: A CORPUS-INFORMED STUDY

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Abstract

In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the textual fit of English-to-Polish translation of a peculiar type of multi-word units known in corpus linguistic literature as lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999). Inspired by a study conducted by Grabar and Lefer (2015), we used the English-Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pęzik 2016) and the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) to extract and explore the use - in terms of frequency distributions - of the Polish equivalents of selected English lexical bundles expressing attitudinal and epistemic stance. More precisely, we used the NKJP corpus to check whether the Polish equivalents are typical of contemporary Polish as found in native texts. The results of this corpus-informed study revealed a high number of Polish equivalents, both single- and multi-word units, expressing stance. Also, the results showed that the majority of Polish equivalents are frequently used in native Polish texts and therefore they can potentially help enhance the textual fit of translations. Finally, we discussed limitations of the methods and corpora used in this preliminary study and presented suggestions on how it can be pursued further in the future to better explore the usefulness of lexical bundles for translation teaching and translation practice. To that end, we also presented proposals of in-class translation activities.

About the authors

ŁUKASZ GRABOWSKI

University of Opole

Email: lukasz@uni.opole.pl
Associate Professor at the Institute of English, University of Opole (Poland). His research interests include corpus linguistics, phraseology, formulaic language, translation studies and lexicography. He is also interested in computer-assisted methods of text analysis. He has published research articles and book chapters internationally in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and English for Specific Purposes as well as with John Benjamins and Emerald, among others. He is also Managing Editor of the journal Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature 11a pl. Kopernika, 45-040 Opole, Poland

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