Re-opening the case

A corpus-based study of translational patterns using non-agentive constructions in translations from English to German

Bibliographic Data

ID21584097
AuthorsJonas Freiwald (0000-0003-3595-8764, Chulalongkorn University), Neumann (0000-0003-3737-7867, Chulalongkorn University)
Year2026
Volume38
Issue1
Pages114-142
Publication date2026-02-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTarget International Journal of Translation Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0924-1884 • E-ISSN: 1569-9986
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/target.24072.fre
OpenAlexW4415051837
LanguageEN
References cited35

How does the variability of the language system affect translational language use? Despite inconclusive results of earlier corpus studies, machine learning approaches reach high accuracies in distinguishing translated from non-translated texts. Translations must therefore involve linguistic patterns easy to spot by computers, but harder to spot by the human analyst. Consequently, the differences have been characterized as small, but systematic. This article adopts a quantitative corpus-based approach to examining shifts in probability between translated and non-translated language. To this end, we investigate how translators handle non-agentive constructions, a phenomenon displaying contrastive usage differences in English and German. A multifactorial analysis of 7441 instances shows that differences are indeed small and that they stem from a multitude of factors. Accounting for these factors turns out to be challenging even for a sophisticated statistical procedure. Therefore, the case of how subtle the effects of translation are cannot be settled just yet

Machine translation · Multitude · Phenomenon · Statistical analysis · Statistical evidence · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology

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