Learner vs. Professional Translations into Russian: Lexical Profiles (original) (raw)
One of the relatively recent trends in learner corpora research is building and exploiting learner translator corpora. Within Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) translations are approached as a special variety of the target language. They are usually represented by texts produced by professional translators and are studied as manifestations of the current translational norm. Learner translations can be seen as a more specific dialect of the said variety, which is likely to deviate from the accepted norm. As of now, typical linguistic features of learner translations as opposed to professional ones are only tentatively described. We hypothesize that these texts should demonstrate heavier translationese features due to the lack of professional skill and comparatively poor source language competence. The aim of this research is to compare learner and professional corpora of Russian translations of English mass-media texts against the reference target language corpus to reveal lexical differences between the three. We find that learner translations consistently show more distance from non-translations than their professional counterparts, while the two undoubtedly form a special type of discourse, which is linguistically different from naturally occurring language. These findings might help define (un)professionalism in translation and shed light on correlation between linguistic features of text and translation quality, as well as be informative in translator education.
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