How English Triggers Processes of Norm Variation in Other European Languages

1
How English Triggers Processes of Norm Variation
in Other European Languages

• Juliane Housejhouse_at_uni-hamburg.dehttp//www.u
  ni-hamburg.de/fachbereiche-einrichtungen/sfb538

2
Structure

• I Project Background, Research Questions and
  Hypotheses
• II Analytical Procedureand Analysis
• III Some Results

3
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

4

• 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 culture-specific
  source language norms are adapted to the norms
  holding in the "receiving" language community

5
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?

6
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)

7
The Projects 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 inference-inducing implicitness and
  propositional opaqueness.

8

• 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.

9
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

10
(No Transcript)
11
Translation- and Comparable Corpora (Example
English-German)
12
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/Spanish-English
• 130 000 Words

13
Method

• Combination of qualitative and quantitative
  methods
• Qualitative House Translation Evaluation Model
• Quantitative Frequency Counts
• Renewed qualitative analysis

14
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

15
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

16

• 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

17
2. Qualitative analytic procedure

• Houses (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
  texts function

18
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

19
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"

20
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

21
A Scheme for Producing, Analysing and Comparing
Original and Translation Texts
22
Overt and covert translation

• Covert translation like a second originalNot
  marked pragmatically as a translationMay have
  been created in its own right
• Translator creates equivalent speech
  eventthrough the use of a cultural filter

23
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 texts
  interpersonal functional component for which
  values along dimensions of Tenor and Mode are
  crucial

24

• 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

25
(No Transcript)
26
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

27
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!

28

• - 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.

29
(1) HIV Vaccines Prospects and Challenges, in
Scientific American, Juli 1998/ Wie nahe ist ein
HIV-Impfstoff, (BT How close is a HIV vaccine)
in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Oktober 1998
30

• 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.)

31
(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 Split-Brain and Consciousness)
32

• 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.)

33
(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)
34

• 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-Immunschwäche-Virus
  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.)

35

• Didactic tenorof 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 texts
  discourse world through the use of various
  linguistic means

36
(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)
37

• 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?

38

• 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?

39

• (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 "After-Pill", 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?)

40
English texts

• Mental processes are used to establish a
  personal relationship with the addressee
• A texts 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

41
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

42
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

43
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!

44
(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.)
45

• 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.)
46
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 (genre-mixing)

47

• 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

48
Subjectivity

• A speakers 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 speakers
  assessment of the truth of the proposition
• "attitudinal stance" referring to the authors
  personal attitude, his value judgements and
  expectations

49

• 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)

50

• 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)

51
4. Diachronic qualitative analyses

• Popular science
• contrastive analyses of English originals,
  German translations and German originals two
  time frames 1978-1982 and 1999-2002Differences
  found in the following areas

52
(1) Description of Content

• Older German translations more explicitly
  structured (use of temporal adverbials,
  conditional and causal conjunctions, advance
  organizers (lists)

53
(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

54

• 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

55
(3) Explicitation

• Older German translationsexplicitations
  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 translationsaddressees' knowledge
  often presupposed, however still systematic
  enrichment with additional details

56
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

57
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

58
Modality

• Modal verbs preferably used in final paragraphs
  (announcements of further action, Böttger
  Bührig 2003)

59
Narrative Sequences

• Much greater frequency in newer texts
• Narratives replace Reports and Descriptions
  (Böttger Probst 2001)

60
5. Validating qualitative analyses

• Translations from English into French and
  Spanish to validate results of analyses of
  English-German translations

61
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

62

• Lack of involvement of addressees- lack of
  mental processes and hearer deixis - no offer of
  identification to readers - absence of narrative
  frames and co-ordinating conjunctions that
  indicated an adaptation to Anglophone norms in
  the German translations

63
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

64

• 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!

65
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
  co-occurrence patterns in the texts

66

• 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)

67
Data Basis (Popular Science)

• English monolingual texts from the years
  1999-2002 (122866 words).
• The German translations of these English texts
  (113420 words).
• German monolingual texts from the years 1999-2002
  (100648 words).
• English monolingual texts from the years
  1978-1982 (42497 words).
• The German translations of these English texts
  (37830 words).
• German monolingual texts from the years 1978-1982
  (82480 words).

68

• 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

69

• 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

70
(1) Deixis
71
(2) Modality

• Particles

• Modal words

72
(3) Mental Processes
73
(4) Connectivity

• And / Und

• Pronominal adverbials

74
(No Transcript)
75
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

76
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!

77
The Booh FactorTranslation as Mediator of the
English Take-Over
Translational process effects change!
78
The X FactorUniversal Impact of Globalisation
Translational process reflects change!
79
The Green FactorTranslation as Cultural
Conservation
Translational process resists change!