Members of CLaC with interests in translation focus on issues such as the building of parallel literary translation corpora (bilingual and multilingual) and the development of techniques for interrogating the corpora to inform research in various areas of translation studies and lexicography. This involves procedures such as the derivation of bilingual concordances to facilitate comparative analysis of linguistic structures, stylistics, translation strategies etc.
Translation Corpus Projects in Progress
Ponying the Slovos: Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
Jim Clarke and Benet Vincent’s translation corpus project investigates translations of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. With the permission of the Burgess Foundation and with the co-operation of colleagues from the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, a multi-lingual parallel corpus is being developed and used to compare translations. A number of translations (currently, French, German, Greek, Polish, Slovak and Spanish) are being investigated. Publications emanating from the project so far are Vincent and Clarke (2017), Malamatidou (2017), Corness (2018), Vincent & Clarke (2020), Curry, Clarke & Vincent (2021), and Vincent & Clarke (2023). For further details please see the project website here.
Lesia Ukrainka’s The Song of the Forest (a classic Ukrainian fantasy drama, 1911)
Patrick Corness has created a parallel translation corpus containing the text of the classic Ukrainian fantasy drama The Song of the Forest by Lesia Ukrainka (1871-1913), aligned with six translations into English. Applying corpus linguistics techniques, he has carried out a comparative analysis focusing on the treatment of specific aspects of the work in the respective translations. A scholarly edition containing his new translation, with the original Ukrainian text en face, an introduction, detailed footnotes, cultural and linguistic commentary, a selective concordance of six translations etc. has been approved for publication. See this website for further details.