The paper reports on a project which applies the model of translation evaluation designed by the present author to the question of whether the English language in its role as a global lingua franca changes textual nor...The paper reports on a project which applies the model of translation evaluation designed by the present author to the question of whether the English language in its role as a global lingua franca changes textual norms in other European languages over and above the massive,well-known lexical import from English into other languages. Following a description of the project's background,design and corpus,the qualitative analytical procedure is outlined,a few exemplary qualitative comparative analyses in two genres(popular science and economic texts)as well as the results of validating qualitative analyses examining translations from English into other languages (French,Spanish)are discussed.The qualitative analyses are then supplemented by quantitative diachronic analy- ses of a number of linguistic elements expressing'subjectivity'and'addressee orientation',as these were found to be primarily affected by the influence of the English language.The paper closes with a brief outlook on the present project phase,where a new cycle of qualitative analyses is conducted,in which those'vulnerable'linguistic forms found to have markedly changed in frequency in the corpus over time(such as personal pronouns,markers of modality or co-ordinate conjunctions)are re-contextualized and investigated in aligned subcorpora in terms of the translation relation and the co-occurrences holding for each individual form in the English and German texts.展开更多
文摘The paper reports on a project which applies the model of translation evaluation designed by the present author to the question of whether the English language in its role as a global lingua franca changes textual norms in other European languages over and above the massive,well-known lexical import from English into other languages. Following a description of the project's background,design and corpus,the qualitative analytical procedure is outlined,a few exemplary qualitative comparative analyses in two genres(popular science and economic texts)as well as the results of validating qualitative analyses examining translations from English into other languages (French,Spanish)are discussed.The qualitative analyses are then supplemented by quantitative diachronic analy- ses of a number of linguistic elements expressing'subjectivity'and'addressee orientation',as these were found to be primarily affected by the influence of the English language.The paper closes with a brief outlook on the present project phase,where a new cycle of qualitative analyses is conducted,in which those'vulnerable'linguistic forms found to have markedly changed in frequency in the corpus over time(such as personal pronouns,markers of modality or co-ordinate conjunctions)are re-contextualized and investigated in aligned subcorpora in terms of the translation relation and the co-occurrences holding for each individual form in the English and German texts.
