Does the process of interpreting flatten the orality-literacy distinction? Measuring collocativity in original and interpreted English and Russian

Dr. Daria Dayter (University of Basel)

The idea that the process of translation effects a change in a text has been around since the early days of the systematic study of translation. Specifically in respect to simultaneous interpreting, one conceptually different kind of translation universal has been postulated: the flattening of orality-literacy continuum. This means that inherently oral genres, e.g. interviews, will become more literate when interpreted, while inherently literate genres, e.g. an opening speech delivered by the President of the General Assembly at a United Nations General Debate, will become more oral.

In this project, I investigate translational variation in a 240,000 word corpus of bidirectional Russian-English simultaneous interpreting (SIREN). I report on the findings concerning one linguistic measure that has been used as an indicator of natural, idiomatic speech, namely collocativity. Collocativity is the degree to which a text relies on pre-patterned chunks characteristic of the language in question. A case can be made that higher collocativity is a marker of higher orality, since linguistic creativity is seen as a literate feature. To measure collocativity in SIREN, I apply the methodology developed by Bernardini (2015) that uses larger corpora to overcome the data bottleneck caused by small interpreting corpora. The findings are compared to Bernardini’s results for written translation and interpreted in light of the continuum flattening hypothesis.

Bernardini, Silvia. 2015. “Translation.” In Douglas Biber & Randi Reppen (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, 515–536. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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