Reading Vertically: Corpus Stylistics and the Study of Translation

Reading Vertically: Corpus Stylistics and the Study of Translation

Date: Wednesday, April 11th 2018
Time: Colloquium Presentation: 12pm
Workshop: 3-5pm

Place: DH Active Learning Space, Food Science Building 4.58

 


Colloquium: Reading Vertically: Corpus Stylistics and the Study of Translation

Laura Linares (UCC)

Since Mona Baker’s (1995) seminal paper on the application of corpus linguistics to the study of translations, the use of corpora in translation studies has greatly increased. However, very little has been done about the application of corpus-based methodologies to the investigation of the particularities of translation from lesser-spoken languages into hegemonic ones.  Furthermore, the application of what has been denominated ‘corpus stylistics’ (Mahlberg 2007) to the study of literary texts and translation has opened new avenues of exploration and new ways of studying and comparing texts.This paper will explore the use of corpus stylistics to understand the impact of asymmetry between languages on the translation and mediation of narrative written in Galician into the hegemonic English speaking-world. This talk will focus on the tools and methods undertaken for the analysis of textual patterns and their transformation in translation —namely the Quanteda package for the analysis of keywords and concordances in R—, and will discuss the uses of corpus stylistics as a methodological framework for the study of literary translation in asymmetrical contexts. 
 
Workshop: Exploring texts with R and Quanteda
This workshop will offer an introduction to quantitative and qualitative textual analysis with the Quanteda package for R. It will be divided in two parts: firstly, an introduction to the basics of working with this package in RStudio will be offered; the participants will have a chance to practice importing texts, looking and concordances and exploring word frequencies and keywords. The second part will focus on the interpretation of the data: examples of keywords and concordances will be provided in order to discuss the challenges and possibilities that this new ‘way of reading’ can offer for the analysis of texts, and its application to the study of translation(s).
No experience with R or RStudio required. The workshop and the materials provided will be in English, although opportunities to look at texts in other languages will be provided for those who want to explore more specific aspects of translation.
 
About the Speaker / Instructor
Laura Linares is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in University College Cork, working on the translation and mediation of narrative from a minority/minorized culture (Galician) into the hegemonic English speaking-world. Prior to this, she completed her Masters by Research in Hispanic Studies with the thesis Translation and Ideology: Resistance in Plácido Castro’s Galician Version of theRubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám. Her main research interests include translation and ideology, cultural representation, translation in non-hegemonic cultures and the role of translation in the construction of identities in a global world, as well as the application of corpus-based methodologies to the study of texts and their translations.