Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky Magisterská diplomová práce
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3. The Corpus3.1 General informationTranslation-inherent explicitation and implicitation as well as other hypothesized translation universals (simplification and normalization in particular) to a lesser extent were analyzed with the help of a parallel corpus that was compiled for the purpose of the present thesis. The texts to be included in the corpus were chosen according to the following set of criteria: a non literary text translated from English into Czech by a single translator, a piece of popular science literature, both the original text and the translation are available. Only one book by one author could be used. Finally, two male translators were chosen: Antonín Hradilek and Anton Markoš. Two samples (each of approximately 2,500 running words) by each of them (and the source texts) were used to create the corpus: Antonín Hradilek’s translations of Edward O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life and Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny and Anton Markoš’s translations of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and James Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia. The overview of all texts can be found in the following chart:
Table 1: The original and translated texts chosen for the corpus In each case—with the exception of The Mismeasure of Man—the beginning of the fourth chapter of the individual books was incorporated in the corpus. A chapter that is labelled as the fifth one in the 1996 revised and expanded edition of The Mismeasure of Man, the only edition that was at our disposal at the time when the corpus was compiled, was used because the introduction that usually stands separate is considered to be chapter 1 here and the fifth chapter called ‘The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention’ corresponds to what is labelled as chapter 4 in the Czech translation. The fourth (or in one case the fifth) chapters were chosen as it was desired to analyze a sample of a neutral text. It was assumed that the beginnings as well as conclusions of books may differ from the remainder of the text and as such, they were excluded from the research.
Table 2: Samples included in for the corpus An interesting conclusion can be drawn from this simple chart. Whereas Hradilek’s second translation is more or less similar to the original as far as the number of words is concerned, his first translation and both Markoš’s texts in particular are considerably shorter. Therefore, it can be assumed that there will be more instances of explicitation and more additions especially in the second text by Hradilek, whereas implicitations, simplifications and omissions are likely to be more common in the first text by Hradilek and in the translations by Anton Markoš. The beginnings of the chapters of these books were scanned and manually searched through for instances of universals of translation, translation inherent explicitation and translation inherent implicitation in particular. Subsequently, the occurrences were assessed quantitatively in order to verify, refuse or modify the above stated hypothesis and in order to find out whether the hypothesis can be applied to a wide range of texts or whether it is applicable to literary texts only. In the second stage of the research, the occurrences were analyzed from the point of view of language functions and meaning components as explained above.
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