In the present paper, the concept of vagueness will be taken up in detail, in order to make it more precise and to pin down its relevance for translation. In addition to view (some) translation choices as contrastive vagueness, I will argue that grammar too has to be contrasted, introducing the concepts of grammatical vagueness and contrastive grammatical vagueness. The problems these phenomena pose for translation are illustrated in the realm of tense and aspect with real translation pairs from (American) English to (European) Portuguese. Key words translation, contrastive studies, tense, aspect, Portuguese, English Introduction It is common to read that, if there is no corresponding vague term in the target language, the translator has a problem, or, at least, s/he may have to choose a particular translation on grounds which are not objective. This idea is connected to the classical explanation that different languages cut different pieces of reality (see, for example, Lyons (1968:...

Concordances extracted from monolingual corpora have been used in a variety of ways to promote second language learning. Parallel concordances have more typically been associated with translation studies, translator training, the development of bilingual lexicography and machine translation. Although the potential benefits of parallel

We investigate the differences between language models compiled from original target-language texts and those compiled from texts manually translated to the target language. Corroborating established observations of Translation Studies, we demonstrate that the latter are significantly better predictors of translated sentences than the former, and hence fit the reference set better. Furthermore, translated texts yield better language models for statistical machine translation than original texts. 1

Historiographic approaches to translation have traditionally relied on paratextual and contextual features of translated texts. Translators ’ notes, prefaces, letters, statements and other types of documentary evidence of their work make up the sources researchers frequently use to explore different avenues in their historical reconstruction of translators ’ praxis. Translated texts themselves also inform researchers ’ surveys albeit less frequently and usually constituting a corpus subject to close observation for selected occurrences to be counted and monitored by the analysts based on their perception and skill to do that. When the object of study consists of a multiplicity of originals and translated texts, the researcher’s task becomes even more demanding, particularly owing to the fact that computation of occurrences has to be done extensively through several texts. The emergence of technological resources such as computer

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Cet article se concentre sur certains des défis méthodologiques et théoriques de l'étude de l'«assainissement » des textes traduits par l'analyse de la prosodie sémantique. L'hypothèse principale est que le vocabulaire des textes cibles est généralement plus restreint que celui de l'original; il en résulte ce que nous appelons des «versions assainies de l'original». This paper focuses on some of the methodological and theoretical challenges presented by the investigation of "sanitisation " in translated texts through the analysis of semantic prosody. The main hypothesis is that target texts tend to use toned down vocabulary compared with their sources, and that this results in the creation of a "sanitised version of the original." The creative potential of language is undeniable, but the concordances to a corpus remind us forcibly that in most of our utterances we are creatures of habit, immensely predictable, rehearsing the same old platitudes and the same old clichés in almost everything we say. If it were not so, language would become unworkable. Humankind cannot bear very much creativity. (Hanks 1996: 85)

This paper aims at raising awareness about electronic language resources (henceforth LR) in the translation community at large. Examining how technological advances in the profession have transformed the notion of translating itself and what is expected from a qualified translator today, the paper goes on to focus on resources, rather than tools. It then discusses what type of LR should feature in the training of professional translators, and how these should be tackled in various translation-training settings. It contains several useful pointers throughout the article and an extensive bibliography covering the various issues addressed herewith.

Convergence and simplification are two of the so-called universals in translation studies. The first one postulates that translated texts tend to be more similar than nontranslated texts. The second one postulates that translated texts are simpler, easier-tounderstand than non-translated ones. This paper discusses the results of a project which applies NLP techniques over comparable corpora of translated and nontranslated texts in Spanish seeking to establish whether these two universals hold Corpas Pastor (2008). 1

This paper presents the compilation of the CroCo Corpus, an English-German translation corpus. Corpus design, annotation and alignment are described in detail. In order to guarantee the searchability and exchangeability of the corpus, XML stand-off mark-up is used as representation format for the multi-layer annotation. On this basis it is shown how the corpus can be queried using XQuery. Furthermore, the generalisation of results in terms of linguistic and translational research questions is briefly discussed. 1

In translation studies the question of how translated texts differ systematically from original texts has been an issue for quite some time with a surge of research in the last ten or so years. Example-based contrastive analyses of small numbers of source texts and their translations had previously described characteristic features of the translated texts, without the availability