Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji
2. The foreign and the domestic in translations: Combining reception and corpus analysis
Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji
Hannu Kemppanen [+]
University of Eastern Finland
Jukka Mäkisalo [+]
University of Eastern Finland
Description
This study has a three-fold objective. First, it aims at examining whether it is possible to classify texts, on one hand into translated and non-translated, and on the other into domestic and foreign, by asking translation students to evaluate them. The questionnaire also seeks to discover which features of these texts are considered as domesticating and which as foreignising. Secondly, the study tries to identify domesticating and foreignising features in translated texts by using corpus methods based on previous studies on characteristics of translated texts. Thirdly, the study discusses whether the results of the two analyses correlate with each other. The material consists of translated and non-translated texts on the political history of Finland. The results show that corpus analysis does not enable us to recognise translational features in a text to the same extent as the readers of translations recognise them in a reception test. The analysis reveals that the concept foreign can be regarded as a marked feature. This finding questions the dichotomic nature of the concept pair domestication vs. foreignisation.