High-profile Translation from the Mother Tongue into the

Foreign Language
Effective Translation Strategies and Implications for Translation Theory and Translator Training
This article was published in Lebende Sprachen 2/2004
Dirk Siepmann
1. Introduction
In this article, which is as much a how-to guide as an academic treatise, I propose to deal with
translation strategies. With a topic such as this, which has been explored from so many different
angles in translation studies skopos theory, psycholinguistics, action theory - it would be
difficult to add anything of substance to a general theory of translation. Instead, I wish to provide
a personal perspective here, one that is grounded in introspection rather than observation of
others.
My reasons for writing this article are two-fold. Firstly, it has been repeatedly claimed that
native speakers are needed for high-profile translation (e.g. Covell Waegner 2000), the
implication being that it is impossible to produce high-quality translations when working from
the mother tongue (or L1) into the second language (or L2). I take issue with this claim, and will
proceed to show how the non-native translator can achieve satisfactory results provided she has a
sound knowledge of the L2, a thorough grounding in contrastive linguistics1[1] and the ability to
make judicious use of a range of data-handling tools and translation strategies. In particular, I
will demonstrate how a successful translation process can be operationalised to a considerable
degree, and therefore taught to students of translation. This will be illustrated mainly with
examples from my own translation work.2[2]
My second reason for writing this article is that the aforementioned avenues of research,
especially the psycholinguistic strand, have yielded little of use to the practising translator. This
is primarily because language students were enlisted as observees. Plainly, though, there is little
point in trying to learn about an activity by observing people who have seldom tackled it
(Siepmann 1996: 39); the main value of psycholinguistic research into the translation process
seems to lie in the accurate portrayal of students translation problems and of the ineffective
strategies they use to overcome them. Admittedly, there have also been a few studies on the
behaviour of professional translators, but all of these abstract away from actual translation
problems in their search for higher-order generalities. Thus, Gerloff (1988) sets up categories

The non-native who intends to translate into English should work thoroughly and methodically
through such textbooks as Smith/Klein-Braley (1985), Friederich (1969) and Gallagher (1982)
(preferably in this order, which reflects an ascending scale of difficulty).

1[1]

2[2]

Although a native speaker of German, I regularly translate into English and French.

intended to describe particular types of strategic behaviour found in her observees. She calls
these inference & reasoning and text contextualization activity. While this categorization yields
the valuable insight that professional translators tend to achieve higher scores on this measure,
the study lacks concrete detail on the ways in which professionals solve specific problems.

2. Preliminary Steps: Compilation of subject-specific mini-corpora

In dealing with high-profile translation assignments, non-native translators (and, to a lesser

extent, native translators) have to make up for a potential lack of linguistic proficiency; they have
to fill gaps in their knowledge of text types, text-type-specific syntax and lexis. A time-honoured
method for doing so is the study of parallel texts, which seeks to identify lexical items and
constructions which might qualify as natural translation equivalents. Today the translator can
also use translation corpora and translation memories, which provide a record of previous work,
but these will expose her to the danger of reproducing flawed translations (unless the translation
memory contains only her own, carefully checked work). It is on the whole much safer to rely on
L2 discourse belonging to the same text type, but which has been independently formulated.
In the case of rigidly conventionalised text types such as powers of attorney (see 3.3 below), it is
sufficient to download a small number of sample texts. The situation is different, though, with
more flexible types of writing, such as travel books, academic prose or company brochures. With
these text types the translator needs a larger sample of text, from which she can extract natural
textual equivalents. The snag is that the manual collection of such sample texts and the
subsequent perusal of the entire text corpus by eye may be extremely time-consuming.
An easy way out of this dilemma is to access that part of the Internet which is sometimes referred
to as the deep or invisible web (Cloutier 2002), to download selected pages from the deep
web using an off-line browser and to convert the downloaded pages, which are usually in HTML
format, into TXT format. Let us go through this process step by step. For the purpose of this
exercise, we will assume that the assignment we have been given is the translation from German
into English of a guide to the architecture of Berlin.

1. Access
one
of
the
following
deep
Web
sites:
www.bubl.ac.uk,
www.completeplanet.com,
www.foreignword.com/eureka/default.asp?lg=en,
www.invisibleweb.com. At www.bubl.ac.uk (the centre for digital library research of
Strathclyde University), for example, you will find a number of links to architecturerelated sites. This will take you to such sites as www.greatbuildings.com,
http://greatstructures.wox.org or www.architectureweek.com. Alternatively, pick out a
number of complex phrases from an English text on architecture already at your disposal
and type them into a search engine using inverted commas. Thus, a google search for
Corinthian six-column portico will take you to www.southbanklondon.com, and if

2.

3.
4.

5.

6.

queried on five-bay elevation, www.yahoo.com

will come up with
http://www.marylandhistoricaltrust.net/ or http://www.historicrockland.org/.
Check whether the owners of the site allow downloads, and whether the content of the
web page has been produced by native speakers of English. If this is the case, you can
then use an off-line browser such as Teleport Pro (www.tenmax.com) to download the
entire website or parts thereof. Usually, you will just want to download text files.
Download at least ten different sites in this way. Since off-line browsers usually include
schedulers, this can be done overnight while you are asleep.
Once downloaded, the HTML-format webpages have to be converted into TXT format.
This can be done with the help of such software packages as HTMASC
(http://www.bitenbyte.com).
Interrogate the text corpus using a concordancer; a free concordancer (Microconcord) is
available from Mike Scotts homepage (www.lexically.net). Each screen of the program
offers extensive guidance on how to use it.
Type in specific lexical items or constructions that are giving you trouble. For example, if
you consult a specialist dictionary such as the Glossarium Artis, volume 8, on the English
equivalent of German Tympanon, you will find both tympan and tympanum. To be able to
ascertain the frequency of these nouns in English text, search your corpus for each of
them. The result might look something like this:

nternal ear and described in detail the tympanum and its relations to the osseou
our fields and finishes at the top in a tympanum which has for ornamentation a l
d opening between two smaller ones. The tympanum is surrounded on all sides by s
Fidicula", "Fistula", "Organa", "Tuba", "Tympanum". Perhaps "Symphonia" is found
lestone church in Ewias also has a fine tympanum set in a decorated archway. Pay
s of the new plastic decoration. In the tympanum the Last Judgement is generally
hurch (D) is rightly known for its fine Tympanum and decorated chevron arch. How
the center of the horizontal bar of the tympanum is the figure of an emperor, be
deep; the height of the back up to the tympanum is three feet five and one-thir

It is evident from this concordance that tympanum is the more common term in English, and that
tympan should be avoided. While this is a fairly straightforward example, corpora and Internet
search engines can also be consulted on trickier points of usage than mere word frequency. To
this we now turn.

3. Strategies at the lexical, syntactic and textual levels

For convenience of presentation, I have established an articifial distinction between the lexical,
syntactic and textual levels. It will be seen, however, that these levels are closely interrelated.

Thus, for example, many word searches are based on a corpus comprising only texts of a
particular type.

3.1. Lexis

The corpus linguistics literature abounds in examples of the manifold uses to which corpora can
be put (a good introduction is Sinclair 2003). In this section I will consider recurrent translation
problems and ways of solving them with the help of self-assembled corpora. My first set of
examples comes from the following autobiographical recount, which I translated into English:

Die Tr fllt ins Schlo, der Blick auf die Kabine. Das Abteil ist klein, aber funktional eingerichtet. Auf zwei mal
eineinhalb Metern ein frisch bezogenes Bett, Leuchten, eine kleine Garderobe, ein Tischchen mit Obst, Wasser und
einer Tageszeitung. Nebenan die Duschkabine mit Toilette und allerlei Badezeug: Seife, Duschgel,
Feuchtigkeitscreme, Handtcher, Zahnputzzeug. Sogar eine Duschhaube und ein Schuhputzschwmmchen liegen
bereit. Die Dusche macht neugierig. Komisches Gefhl, nackt in einem fahrenden Zug zu stehen. Whrend hinter
dem Fenster die Landschaft vorbeizieht, wandert die Hand mitrauisch unters laufende Wasser. Warm. Trinkwasser
kommt zwar nicht aus der Leitung, aber sonst ist an der Dusche nichts auszusetzen. (Frankfurter Rundschau)

In translating this genre, corpora of literary or newspaper language can be particularly helpful.
One may either use one of the commercially available corpora and text archives, such as
newspaper CD-ROMs, parts of the British National Corpus and the Library of the Future, or one
may compile ones own text archive by following the procedure outlined above. Newspaper text
can be obtained from the websites of a large number of national and regional newspapers.
Literary texts which have fallen into the public domain can be downloaded from Project
Gutenberg. Some publishers also offer samples of their novels or short stories
(http://www.harpercollins.com.au/books/extracts.cfm,
http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/offthepage/extracts.htm, www.bloomsbury.com), and there is a
rising
number
of
fan
fiction
or
amateur
author
sites
(e.g.
http://www.electricfrontiers.com/electricpen/stories.asp), some of which contain material of an
acceptable standard.
To return to the above example, there are quite a few translation problems in evidence which the
non-native will find difficult to solve. Let us look at just three of these:

1. The parallel construction of the first sentence: die Tr fllt ins Schloss, der Blick auf die
Kabine.
2. The collocation die Landschaft zieht vorbei (hinter dem Fenster).

3. The syntagm wandert die Hand mitrauisch unters laufende Wasser

Let us deal with these problems in sequence:

1. Any translator who reads English novels with any regularity will probably experience no
difficulty with the collocation die Tr fllt ins Schloss (= the door clicks/snaps/slides [sliding
door] shut). The opposite is true of the second part of the sentence, which is really an instance of
zeugma; the non-zeugmatic version would read die Tr fllt ins Schloss, der Blick fllt auf die
Kabine. We may consult the corpus for verb-noun collocations based on the English noun gaze
or the plural noun eyes, or, more specifically, for collocations of gaze/eyes+ verb + room; a few
are shown below:

ces at BALKAN, who looks on calmly. His eyes roam along the spines of the books.
she replies with a smile. I let my eyes roam over the rest of her body. She
m, smiles faintly, then lets her own eyes roam over the great sea of upturned
Spike sat back on his heels and let his eyes roam over Angel's nude form. Gods,
THE GHOST HAS DISAPPEARED. Sidney's eyes roam the yard but he's nowhere. Co
scar across his throat. His mocking eyes roam the church. KURGAN Kasta
er was in the shadows watching her. His eyes roamed her every curve. He looked
ite a pair, actually, she murmured, her gaze roaming his chest in a way that made
Then I look back up at him, letting my eyes take in his perfect body as I do. H
y.
Who knew? Hans' eyes take in his bare feet. MCCLANE
away the
sweat-soaked sheet. Her eyes take in his bare torso,
and w
400. C. U. OF ED - as his horrified eyes take in the scene, then he turns to
smelling the smoke. In the process his eyes take in Sarah who has the idol cl
e puts his hands in his pockets and his eyes wander about the room until they f
SLIVING ROOM--NIGHT Where she sits. Her eyes wander around the room and then re
"Yeah, the blues are great." Faith's eyes wander around the cab of the truck.
SLIVING ROOMNIGHT Where she sits. Her eyes wander around the room and then re
I really did mean 'prey'. I let my eyes wander around the room as I continu

We find that both gaze and eyes are always used with a genitive or a possessive pronoun in the
relevant sense, and collocate with a wide variety of verbs; for reasons of space, not all of these
can be shown in the above concordance.
We also note from close observation of the right-hand context (see below) that a literal
translation would be rather ungainly. This is because the collocation eyes/gaze + fall on/to
implies a single line of sight and requires a prepositional object denoting a person or a thing of
limited size; it must be conceded, however, that, given the size of railway compartments, they
may be taken in at one glance, so that we are here dealing with a borderline case.

a
hip dance club. His eyes fall on Maria Mitchell. SERGE
to come up with a plan. Then his
eyes fall on the wrought iron fenced gat
leads Betty up close Adam turns and his eyes fall on the beautiful face of Bett
er. Butch glances to his right, his eyes fall on something. What he sees
er is about to sit at his desk when his eyes fall on a new ghetto blaster
leased, others mumbling angrily. Sikes' eyes fall on George who is gazing at him
rs at the
crowd... ...his eyes fall on Vanity -- his face
You don't believe me? (looks around; eyes fall on kissing couple) There. T
ugh the
security door. Archer's eyes fall on the thumbprint scan
p
here. From nothing. One by one, all eyes fall on the little girl and the
rs at the
crowd... ...his eyes fall on Vanity -- his face
BILLY BEAR
His eyes fall on the rear view mirror. A whi
ing, he looks all around the room...his eyes fall on a tape dispenser.
eal who Gandhi is. The prison officer's eyes fall on him. CITY STREET. JOHANN
ple passing are Jack and Buster. Jack's eyes fall on the placard and he stops
room at shampoos, cosmetics, until her eyes fall on a poster of "Gilda" starri
eally sorry.. there wasn't time. His eyes fall on an old blanket. KORBEN

Thus our translation could read as follows:

... my gaze / eyes take in / wander around / drift around / roam (around) the compartment (cabin).

One variant is to use the verbs look or glance with a personal subject but, given the impersonal
wording of the source text, this would constitute a less faithful rendition.

Turning to the second problem, we note that it would probably be unwise to search for the nouns
landscape or scenery alone, since these are exceedingly common in novels and newspapers.
However, a combination of landscape/scenery and window within a span of 5 or 6 words might
do the trick. And indeed the concordancer comes up with the following results:

d his eyes. Through a curtained window, scenery was whizzing by at dizzying spee
head and fixate my eyes upon the moving scenery whizzing by the window. I stare
Scully looked out of the window as the scenery passed by. She seemed to be dozi
impassive profile, at the brown October landscape passing behind her outside the
t the window, the rural
scenery: pastures, barns, etc., the othe
om the window, trying not to see the landscape reeling outside. SARAH (
e stared out the window and watched the scenery roll by as they headed back into
asn't used to it. The dark forms of the landscape rolled soothingly past outside
..... Her eyes fluttered open to a dark landscape rolling past the window. There
r eyes and looked out the window at the scenery rolling past. "At least the scen
er sat in the back seat and watched the scenery fly past the window. He had two
and she takes a sudden interest in the scenery flying by outside her window. I

Our translation can be closely modelled on the above concordance, and we are spoilt for choice:

While the landscape (scenery) rolls (flies, rushes, sweeps, etc.) past the window / flies by (outside) the window, ...

The third translation problem is of the same ilk as the preceding one. It shows that reliable
intuitions about English and a firm grounding in dictionary use are essential prerequisites for
non-native translation, for there needs to be some initial awareness that dictionary equivalents
such as suspicious or mistrustful for mitrauisch are unacceptable in the present instance. To
arrive at a suitable equivalent, the translator must key the word hand and the context word water
into the concordancer. As shower scenes are a popular feature of modern novels or films, the
computer will come up with a good handful of examples, among which we find the phrases
testing the temperature and to test it, which are exactly equivalent to German mitrauisch in
this case. We may also observe a number of noun + verb collocations which highlight the fact
that the German animistic structure cannot be imitated in English. Simply put, from an English
point of view, a hand cannot do anything independently of its owner; the quasi-meronymic
relation between person and hand has to be made explicit in English (e.g. Arthur his hand).

Take it, quickly! Arthur dips his hand under the water and grasps the hilt
tops, fascinated. CLOSE UP of Amy's hand under the surface of the water. The
ned the tap for the shower and held her hand under the running water. Unlike the
jaw.Fucking martyr.He pushed a hand under the streaming water, testing the temp
camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump f
he switched on the shower and stuck her hand under the flow of water. The warm w
d. He's crouched by the tub, naked, one hand under the flow of water from the ta
waters cooling, anyway." He dipped his hand in the water to test it. Barely
r you. She pumps and DAVID puts his hand under the cool, flowing water -camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump f
camp. CAMILLE Here, you put your hand under the water and I'll pump f
urning on the cold faucet, he stuck his hand under the stream of water. He stare

We can now complete our translation of the sentence in question:

While the landscape (scenery) rolls (flies, rushes, sweeps) past the window / flies by (outside) the window, I dip
(put, stick) my hand under (into, in) the running (flowing, flow of) water to test it / to test the temperature.

The second example I want to cite is from an estate agents brochure advertising a luxury
apartment in Mallorca. In this case, the obvious thing to do is to compile a corpus of similar
brochures in English. It then becomes fairly easy to spot text-type-specific equivalents such as
the following:

(estate agent) German

Eigentumsanlage
... bietet hchstes Wohngefhl

search for
apartment
feeling, living, feeling + living

(estate agent) English

apartment community
... creates a true feeling of luxurious
living
die Wohnung ist als neuwertig zu as new/as good as new + the apartment has been maintained in
bezeichnen
apartment -> no results; pristine condition
condition + apartment
... und einem unverbaubaren und view
an unobstructable and spectacular
spektakulren
Blick
ber
das
view of the Mediterranean
Mittelmeer ...

With the exception of the noun + adjective collocation spectacular + view, which can be found
in Oxford Collocations, none of the above equivalents have been recorded in the available
dictionaries, and dictionary searches would indeed lead one astray, suggesting, as they do,
equivalents such as owner-occupied flat for Eigentumswohnung or as (good as) new for
neuwertig. While these equivalents might be used in a classified ad for a cheap holiday flat, they
would clearly be inappropriate in a glossy brochure featuring an apartment worth 3 million
euros.

Internet searches can be used for similar purposes. Three major strategies that non-native
translators can avail themselves of are worth mentioning, viz. a) intelligent guessing, b) Boolean
searches and c) searching for negative evidence of non-occurrence:

a) Intelligent guessing: it usually pays to have a healthy mistrust of the dictionary. Thus, I
was not happy with the equivalents the dictionaries had to offer for Jachthafen (marina)
or Pilgerstadt (place of pilgrimage), and surmised that yacht harbour or pilgrimage town
would be more acceptable in the relevant contexts.3[3] Assuming that ones second
language is British English, the procedure to follow in such cases is to access a search
engine such as yahoo.co.uk, select the options UK only or Ireland only, to type in
yacht harbour in inverted commas and to check the results for relevance by accessing

See table below. Pilgerstadt was used in a caption (Maria X., Floristin in der Pilgerstadt
Kevelaer) underneath a photograph. A rendering that made use of the dictionary equivalent
would have read rather awkwardly (*in the place of pilgrimage of Kevelaer).
3[3]

websites. Here are a few more examples of this kind of intelligent guessing, which can
also be resorted to when the dictionary fails to provide any help:

b)

German original

Dictionary
equivalents

Intelligent
guess

English translation

Nach Palma und dem

berhmten Jachthafen
Puerto Portals
die
Pilgerstadt
Kevelaer
weltweiter
TVEmpfang
Eingangsbereich

marina

yacht harbour

the famous yacht harbour of

Puerto Portals

place of pilgrimage

pilgrimage town

worldwide TV reception

the pilgrimage town of

Kevelaer
worldwide TV reception

entrance area

entrance area

Boolean searches: these make use of operators such as and, or or near. Suppose
you had to translate the following sentence into English:
Die Nachbarschaft ist international. Nach Palma und dem berhmten Jachthafen Puerto Portals sind es
jeweils nur etwa 3 Minuten mit dem Auto.

The keywords which can be combined in a search are 3 minutes and car (or train, rail,
etc.). Yahoo.co.uk will come up with a host of examples containing the phrase 3 minutes
by car, which gives us
Palma and the famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals are only three minutes by car. (or: It is only three
minutes by car from Palma and the famous yacht harbour of Puerto Portals.)

c) Negative evidence of non-occurrence: if the translator wants to be 100 per cent certain
that a literal rendering of bietet hchstes Wohngefhl by means of offers a feeling of
high living may not fit the bill, the Internet can provide negative evidence of nonoccurrence. It is sufficient to type offers a feeling of high living (or some such phrase)
into a search engine, which will probably come up with no examples at all, or else alert
the translator to differences in meaning between high living and luxurious living.

Corpus and Internet searches may also be combined. Consider the following sentence:

Die Anlage liegt inmitten eines wunderschn angelegten Parks mit groem Auenpool und Liegeflchen.

The plural noun Liegeflchen will be hard to find in any available dictionary. Two strategies can
be pursued to locate a natural equivalent: a) type swimming pool and into the corpus or the
search engine or b) perform a Boolean search on swimming pool and and luxury apartment,
and scan the results for an appropriate rendering of Liegeflchen, such as sun terraces.

Needless to say, Internet or corpus-based strategies can be fruitfully combined with traditional
strategies. A few illustrations follow:

An der Sdseite vor dem Salon, dem Hauptschlafzimmer und einem der Gstezimmer befindet sich eine sehr groe
berdachte Terrasse.

The dictionary equivalent given under the headword berdachen is roof over. The non-native
translator should now check this equivalent against Internet evidence; on yahoo.co.uk she will
find just one example of the past participle roofed-over in attributive use, and no native-speaker
evidence of the collocation roofed-over + balcony/terrace (terraces are at ground floor level).
This suggests that a rendering such as roofed-over balcony - which, incidentally is highly
common in Internet advertisements by non-native speakers - would be of doubtful acceptability.
The next step, then, is to consult a dictionary of synonyms, where roof over will be mentioned in
conjunction with its hyperonym cover. The collocation balcony + covered can then be checked
against the Web, where a host of native-speaker examples will be found. Thus, the following
translation can be proposed:

Facing south in front of the living room, the master bedroom and one of the guestrooms is a very
large covered balcony.

A similar strategy can be used to translate a phrase such as automatische Lichtsteuerung bei
Bewegung. This will remind the translator of the near-synonym Bewegungsmelder, whose
English equivalent (passive infrared detector alarm, or PIR for short), if unknown, can be looked
up in a dictionary. It can then be keyed into a search engine and will lead the translator to a
number of sites whose owners, apart from producing PIRs as security devices, also offer other
light-saving, sensor-operated gadgetry. She can then translate the phrase as sensor-operated
lighting which registers movement or presence detection system (for lighting management).
The following expression prompted a similar search:

dreidimensionale Knsterglastren im Hauptbad

The compound noun Knstlerglass may cause a comprehension problem. It is absent from the
10-volume Duden and from the website of the research project on German vocabulary
(http://wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/inhalt.htm). A yahoo search, however, yields a
number of results, some of which suggest an association with companies such as Rosenthal. A
Boolean search on Rosenthal and glass will then reveal that stained glass or even art glass may
be used to render the somewhat cryptic German compound.

Another traditional strategy worth mentioning is to consult dictionary entries for words of the
same word family. Gallagher (1982: 116) uses this strategy to find acceptable equivalents for the
following sentence:

Kein Zyklus gleicht dem anderen.

Gallagher comments:

The dictionary equivalents given under the catchword gleichen are unacceptable in this particular instance. In some
dictionaries, however, workable equivalents may be found under the catchword gleich:

(i)

No two have been alike. (W/H.)

(ii)

No fingerprint is exactly like another. (O-HSG-ED)

(iii)

No two fingerprints are exactly alike. (ibid.) (underlines mine)

All three equivalents can be used to render the German sentence. To arrive at this rendering,
Gallagher was able to explore his linguistic intuitions about his native language, a possibility not
open to many non-native translators. The latter therefore have to take the intermediate step of
checking the dictionary equivalents found at both gleichen and gleich against corpora and the
Internet.

I adopted Gallaghers procedure in translating the following sentence from an image brochure:

Der Kreis Borken gehrt zu den geburtenstrksten im Lande.

Since there is no single English adjective which can render German geburtenstark, I had to resort
to another element of the same word family, namely the noun birth figures (or birth rate). The
next step consisted in finding suitable collocations, such as high + figures and boast + figures,
leading to the following translation:

The district of Borken boasts some of the highest birth figures in Northrhine-Westphalia. (or: the
district of Borken boasts [has] one of the highest birth rates in Northrhine-Westphalia).

Lastly, definitions in monolingual dictionaries or encyclopaedias, which may be regarded as

concise parallel texts, may be exploited to retrieve suitable translation equivalents.

3.2 Syntax

In recent years the Saussurean dichotomy between langue and parole has rapidly been losing
ground in the face of new evidence from corpus linguistics. Especially problematic is the
structuralist assumption that lexis and syntax are neatly distinct and autonomous systems which
do not impact on one another other than through the operation of general semantic rules and
regularities. Lexico-grammars such as Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996, 1998) provide
overwhelming evidence to the contrary: there is, in fact, a high degree of interdependence
between communicative, lexical and syntactic choices or, more simply put, between sense and
syntax.4[4]

This clearly undermines the Sausurrean dichotomy (cf. Sinclair 1991): in the absence of an
independent syntactic core of language, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to specify the
essence of an abstractly conceived language system; at best, we may assume a large number of
heterogeneous lexico-syntactic subsystems or patterns4[4] or, as Sinclair (1991: 105) has it, an
integrated sense-structure complex. The only unifying feature would be the notion of pattern as
such, as described in Hunston and Francis (2000) and Hunston (2001). Given the impossibility of
generalizing across instances of language use to arrive at a unifying theory, the distinction
4[4]

Corpus and Internet enquiries as well as the above-mentioned lexico-grammars enable the
translator to compare lexico-syntactic subsystems across languages at a hitherto unimagined
degree of delicacy, and they allow the translator trainer to operationalise the translation process
to a very considerable degree. This is particularly true with pragmatic texts such as newspaper
articles, treaties or manuals, and only slightly less so with literary texts (to the extent that
novelists or poets defamiliarize language use).
An example from my own translation work may serve to illustrate how contrastive analysis
can be operationalised at the sentence level; the source and target texts are excerpts from the
website of a German photographer:

German original

English translation (D.S.)

Fr Journalisten bieten wir einen umfassenden Service, der

sich schon oft arbeitserleichtend bewhrt hat:
Terminplanung vor der Anreise
Flughafenabholung
Separate Gstewohnung mit Terrasse
bersetzungen
Internetzugang
ADSL und LEONARDO PRO
Fahrdienst Inselscout.
und natrlich Fotografie.
So ersparen Sie sich unntige Zeitverluste wegen
Ortsunkenntnis, Taxi, Mietwagen, Hotelbuchung, bersetzer
etc.

We provide a comprehensive service for journalists, which

has often contributed to lightening their work load:
time scheduling prior to arrival
collection from airport
separate guest flat with roof garden
translation service
Internet access
ADSL and LEONARDO PRO
chauffeur service island scout ...
... and, of course, photography.
This will save you from wasting time unnecessarily trying to
find your way around and looking for taxis, hire cars, hotels,
translators, etc.

Fig. 5: German original and English translation of a website

The last sentence of this excerpt is not easy to translate into idiomatic English, and the
superficial difference in structure and length between the source and target versions might
suggest that the English translation is merely a matter of intuition. It is of course true that, in
practice, the experienced translators accumulated savoir-faire or, to put it in cognitivepsychological terms, her linguistic and procedural knowledge will lead her to automatically
transpose the noun Zeitverluste to a verb.

between langue-centred contrastive linguistics and parole-centred translatology becomes

blurred accordingly.4[4] The time is thus ripe for a paradigm shift which will considerably widen
the scope of contrastive linguistics. (see also the conclusion of this article)

Yet such a strategy can be operationalised in terms of lexico-syntactic subsystems. The translator
has to convey the concept of Zeitverlust in neutral English style. The central lexical items
available for this purpose are noun + verb collocations, notably waste time, lose time and
squander time, rather than the highly formal compound noun time loss5[5]; of these noun + verb
collocations, waste time is the most common. The lexico-syntactic subsystem containing the verb
waste in this sense is described in Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996: 289-290). There the
translator learns that verbs concerned with passing time in a particular way typically enter the
colligational pattern verb + noun phrase + -ing -clause; she therefore has to construct her target
sentence around this pattern, so that the prepositional phrase wegen Ortsunkenntnis, Taxi,
Mietwagen, Hotelbuchung, bersetzer has to be converted into an ing- clause and the
compound nouns have to be translated by means of verbs. The translator may now consult a
corpus or the Internet for the construction under discussion, and will find the German meaning
expressed as follows:

Plan the storage of your equipment so that you will not waste time unnecessarily in looking around for them.
Firms spend half their time dealing with lawyers ...
Your effects unit really saved me from lounging around and wasting time unnecessarily.
We should not spend our time worrying about the future ...
Dont spend too much time shopping ...
But before Mr Major and Mr Blair waste more time trying to double-guess them ...
... waste management time dealing with such a challenge
it does not waste much time worrying about its pride being hurt
... skilled reserves who can jump back in without losing time learning a routine

This leaves her with possible chunks such as

waste time (unnecessarily) / spend too much time / lose time (unnecessarily) ... worrying about / dealing with /
looking for / trying to ...

An alternative, stylistically less satisfying rendering may be based on the noun + participle
collocation lost time: this will help you avoid lost time (+ -ing-clause / from + noun phrase).

5[5]

Note that such corpus-based analysis throws up a far greater variety of equivalences than
intuition, precisely because it is based on a comparison of lexico-syntactic subsystems. The last
step is to ferret out an English equivalent for the German collocation Zeitverlust + ersparen, such
as save (s.o.) from wasting time, help (s.o.) avoid wasting time or stop (s.o.) [from] wasting time.
Thus, we arrive at the following variants:

This
These services

will save
will stop
will help you (to) avoid

wasting time
losing time
spending too much time

(unnecessarily)
(unnecessarily)

trying to find your way around

having to find your way around
finding your way around

you
you

from
(from)

(in)
(in)
(in)

and looking for ...

and worrying about ...
and dealing with (such matters as)

In a way such an analysis exemplifies the interplay between the open-choice principle and the
idiom principle (Sinclair 1991). Each open choice of a particular variant entails specific lexical
and syntactic constraints on the surrounding discourse, the central open choices in the present
example being the verbs stop/save and waste/spend. An alternative corpus search could start with
the concept of problem avoidance, yielding less faithful but functionally equivalent translations
such as this will save you the hassle / the trouble of finding your way around Mallorca ..., these
services will save (you) hours of searching for ..., these services will save hours of research time
for journalists, etc.
My second example comes from a textbook of translation (Lozes and Lozes 1994):

English original
A silver lining to antiques fair in Dublin

French translation
Eclaircie sur le Salon des Antiquaires de Dublin

As long as I can remember, the Irish Antiques Dealers

Fair, which opens next Monday in the Mansion House
in Dublin, has been preceded by groans of despair from
the antique trade. This year, the 27th year of the event is

Aussi loin que je me souvienne, le Salon des

Antiquaires irlandais, qui ouvre ses portes lundi
prochain Mansion House Dublin, est prcd de
pleurs et de gmissements de la part des gens de la

no exception.

profession. Cette anne, vingt-septime anniversaire de

cette manifestation, ne fait pas exception.

Fig. 1: An excerpt from a textbook of translation (Lozes and Lozes 1994: 42-43)

For the inexperienced translator, both the English original and the French translation may at first
glance appear to contain a large number of creative, one-off occurrences. As a corpus-linguistic
investigation shows, nothing could be further from the truth. Leaving aside the headline for the
moment, we can see that the English text begins with a fixed expression (as long as I can
remember), which can be rendered by means of a small number of equally fixed French
equivalents (daussi loin que je me souvienne, aussi loin que je me souvienne). Here the relevant
English and French lexico-syntactic subsystems resemble each other perfectly.
It is somewhat different with the lexico-syntactic subsystem comprising the subject and the
verb of the relative clause. This pattern can be glossed as follows:

Event/Public Place (trade

museum, shop, ...)
The Irish Antique Dealers Fair

fair, Verb Expressing Start of Event

opens

Fig. 2 : A lexico-syntactic subsystem

In Francis, Hunston and Manning (1996: 8) this pattern is subsumed under a more general
pattern termed the Begin and Stop Group. Other typical members of this group include:

The talks
The negotiations

began
ended

Fig. 3: Examples of a lexico-syntactic subsystem comprising verbs denoting beginning and ending

It is fairly easy to locate the same lexico-syntactic subsystem in newspaper French; one then
finds that the verb ouvrir is not normally used on its own in this pattern:

Event/Public Place (trade

museum, shop, ...)
le muse de lAventure Peugeot
le Salon de lagriculture

fair, Verb Expressing Start of Event

ouvre ses portes
ouvrira ses portes

Fig. 4 : A segment of the French lexico-syntactic subsystem noun (event) + verb (expressing start of event)

A trawl through a newspaper-based corpus also reveals that an indirect object is often appended
to the phrase ouvrir ses portes, a variant which Lozes and Lozes (1994) fail to mention. This
indirect object commonly takes the form aux visiteurs or au public.
In their commentary Lozes and Lozes (1994: 43) describe their rendition of open by ouvrir
ses portes as an instance of toffement (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958: 9), or syntactic
augmentation. It thus appears as if they have used a text-specific translation procedure which
falls outside the scope of contrastive linguistics, especially since the target-language syntagm
differs in structure and length from the source-language syntagm. However, as our corpus
investigation has shown, the augmentation in question might equally well be regarded as a
regular equivalence amenable to contrastive analysis. Similar analyses could be made for all the
other translatorial choices evident in the above texts. This is because, as corpus linguists (Gross
1988, Stubbs 1997, Altenberg 1998) have demonstrated, up to 80 per cent of all text is made up
of habitual word associations, while the remaining 20 per cent consists of language of regular
composition or slight deviations from the collocational norm.
Even such apparent deviations, however, can usually be elucidated and translated by recourse
to the relevant lexico-syntactic subsystem. A pertinent example is provided by the headline of
the above article. As Lozes and Lozes note, we are dealing with an imaginative reworking of the
proverb every cloud has a silver lining (the obvious implication being that the antique trade is in
the doldrums at the moment of writing, but that the future does not look all too bleak); even such
seemingly creative reworkings of common metaphors frequently become a standard part of
media language, as the following headlines and text excerpts show:

Silver lining for Patriarch in Irish Derby

Silver lining for Eddery and Dunlop
Nationalisms Silver Lining
there may be a silver lining to this particular censorious cloud ...
the silver lining to rail privatisation is that ...

Although Lozes and Lozes (1994) implicitly suggest that their rendition of silver lining by
claircie rests on their translatorial intuition, it could be shown that the French meteorological
term claircie and the English compound noun silver lining occupy much the same position
within a metaphorical subsystem or thought metaphor that could be glossed as follows:
pleasant or unpleasant events or situations can be likened to pleasant or unpleasant weather
conditions. The following French newspaper headlines lend evidence to this:

Eclaircie sur les valeurs de lhabillement

Eclaircie sur la ligne Paris-Alger
Eclaircie sur le front de lemploi aux Etats-Unis

This shows that Lozes and Lozes rendition is particularly fortunate because they have hit
upon a close equivalent in the same lexico-syntactic subsystem.

3.3 Text Type

We have already seen that lexis is, to a certain extent, text-type specific. Thus, whereas as new
may be a perfectly good rendering of neuwertig in normal conversation, it would have an air of
infelicity in a glossy brochure featuring a 3-million-euro apartment, where a phrase like in
pristine condition seems more appropriate. As demonstrated above, such text-type-specific lexis
can be located with comparative ease in subject-specific corpora.
Sometimes, however, it is not necessary to have recourse to an entire corpus, as in the case of
highly stereotyped text types such as powers of attorney, where the download of two or three
sample texts will usually do the trick. To translate the following German power of attorney into
French, I started by searching for French samples of this text type on the Internet (see, for
example, http://www.guidesocial.ch/Documents/1/1_68.htm or www.staffeurs.org/pouvoir.pdf )
and then followed the traditional procedure of close textual analysis. The other translation
problems evident in the German text were solved by means of the procedures outlined in sections
3.1 and 3.2:

German original

French translation

Vollmach t

Pouvoir (F) / Procuration (CH)

Hiermit bevollmchtigen wir,

Les soussigns:

Peter Mustermann, geboren 1.7.1890

Monsieur Peter Mustermann et Madame Maria Mustermann,

demeurant / domicilis Mustermannweg 8, Braunschweig, R.F.A

und
donnent pouvoir, par la prsente,
Maria Mustermann, geboren 1.7.1890
Madame Marie Dubois, demeurant / domicilie Ptaouschnock

deffectuer en leur nom les dmarches administratives ayant trait la

beide wohnhaft Mustermannweg 8, Braunschweig, Deutschland,

construction de la remise attenante au btiment dj existant

(cadastre 4341) situ ...

La prsente procuration se limite au pouvoir de reprsentation auprs

de la direction dpartementale de lEquipement ou auprs des autres

Frau Marie Dubois, geboren 1.7.1890

administrations comptentes en matire de permis de construire ainsi

que de contrle et rception des travaux.

wohnhaft Ptaouschnock

in

unserem

Namen

die

behrdlichen

Angelegenheiten

wahrzunehmen, die im Zusammenhang stehen mit der Errichtung der

Remise am bisher bestehenden Gebude Cadastre 4341 in
Ptaouschnock.

Diese Vollmacht umfasst ausschlielich das Vertretungsrecht

gegenber der zustndigen Baubehrde oder den staatlichen Stellen,
die fr die Baugenehmigung, -berwachung und abnahme zustndig
sind.

Weitergehende Rechte sind mit dieser Vollmacht nicht verbunden.

Der deutsche Text ist nur als Grundlage der franzsischen

bersetzung zu sehen. Bei Meinungsverschiedenheiten ber deren
Auslegung ist ausschlielich der franzsische Text magebend.

4. Conclusion

Aucun autre droit nest accord au titre de la

prsente. En cas de diffrend sur
linterprtation de la prsente, seul le texte
franais (et non pas le texte-source allemand)
fera foi.

From what has been said two important conclusions emerge, one of which concerns
translation practice and translator training, while the other touches upon translation theory.

1.

It has been shown that non-native translators with an excellent command of the L2
can reliably carry out highly demanding inverse translations provided that they are
familiar with a range of corpus- or Internet-based translation strategies. These
strategies, as well as the linguistic research on which they are based (notably pattern
grammar), should become part of the stock-in-trade of any professional translator
intending to work into the L2, and of any language student struggling to translate
difficult pragmatic or literary texts. To this end, translator trainers and modern
language department staff must develop a more detailed, step-by-step guide to the
strategies in question.

2.

In cases where two texts are designed to assume the same, or closely similar functions
in two cultures (Funktionskonstanz, or functional invariability, as skopos, cf. Rei
and Vermeer 1984), corpus-based contrastive analysis can supply objective criteria for
the discovery and assessment of any translation solution, thereby providing a more
scientific basis for translation criticism and laying the foundations for a fusion of
contrastive linguistics and translatology. In this view translation solutions, rather than
being one-off, parole-based occurrences, turn out to be instantiations of sense-structure
complexes existing in more than one language; the translators task is to identify the
key semantic concepts contained in the text to be translated, to study target-language
lexico-syntactic subsystems encoding these concepts and to build the target text around
the patterns of colligation, collocation and text grammar found in these subsystems. In
the rare event, however, that the client commissions a translation whose function
differs from that of the source text, contrastive linguistics and translation science must
part company. The relevance of this latter type of translation situation has been
somewhat overstated by translation theorists (cf. Schmitt 1990 and 1999 on translation
practice), and this has led to a similar overstatement of the differences between
contrastive linguistics and translation studies.

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