It's non-canonical word order that you should use! A corpus approach to avoiding standardized word order in translated French

Rudy Loock (1)

1 STL - Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163

In this article, through the use of several corpora containing original and translated texts, we investigate the use of non-canonical word order in EN-FR texts translated by students in order to determine whether target language norms are respected. We first provide information on cross-linguistic differences between original English and original French, and then compare these results with the characteristics of students’ translations. Our goal is clearly pedagogical: we aim to use data from electronic corpora to sensitize students to differences between their use of the French language in their translations and original French. This is particularly important because of the latest developments of machine translation, which make it crucial for translators to determine their added value over machine-translated texts; we therefore also analyze a sample of machine-translated texts. We conclude on the importance of respecting target language norms in relation to word order to increase naturalness and translator invisibility.

Mots clés: Corpus-Based Translation Studies; Translation training; Non-standard word order; Machine translation MT

Domaines: Linguistique

Rudy Loock. It's non-canonical word order that you should use! A corpus approach to avoiding standardized word order in translated French. Sylviane Granger; Marie-Aude Lefer. Translating and Comparing Languages: Corpus-based Insights Selected Proceedings of the Fifth Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies Conference, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, pp.81-97, 2020, 978-2-87558-994-1. ⟨hal-02945313⟩