Semantic prosody and specialised translation, or how a lexico-grammatical theory of language can help with specialised translation
Abstract
Corpus linguistics has invaded translation studies and practice over the
last fifteen years, allowing researchers to analyse the language of
translation or to use corpora as tools in the translation process. This
study deals with the application of a theoretical and methodological
corpus linguistics approach to pragmatic translation, more precisely with
the analysis of semantic prosody in a contrastive study both between
French and English, and between general and specialised language. The
data confirm that semantic prosody does not present a univocal matching
between two languages. Moreover, the study demonstrates the need for
corpus data over intuition to understand the fluctuation of semantic
prosody between general language and languages for specific purposes.
Finally, the question of translation based on corpus data will be
addressed.