Antrittsvorlesungen in der Philosophischen Fakultät

Towards a corpus-based methodology for investigating historical ‘translationese’ in Late Modern English scientific texts

A long-standing question in translation studies is whether translated language exhibits universal linguistic features across time, registers and contexts, irrespective of language pair or translation direction. While contemporary translation studies has extensively explored hypotheses on translation universals, historical translations – particularly those of specialised texts – have remained largely overlooked. At the same time, English historical linguistics has yet to fully explore translations as a site of language contact, especially within the Late Modern English (LModE) period (1700–1900), when scientific translations between vernacular languages, following the decline of Latin, began to professionalise and emerge as a distinct genre, likely characterised by common features. This lecture proposes a corpus-based methodology to investigate historical ‘translationese’ in LModE scientific texts. It focuses on S-universals, such as interference and explicitation, and T-universals, such as normalisation, within historical contexts. These features require a corpus-based approach, as some may only be statistical deviations, which cannot be fully captured through close reading alone. The aim is to construct a diachronic parallel corpus of translated scientific LModE texts and their French source texts, enabling quantitative linguistic analysis to test whether proposed universal tendencies are consistent or evolve in response to historical, register-related or linguistic factors. The lecture also outlines a method for constructing this corpus, including how to identify relevant archival materials, ranging from handwritten to printed texts. Some translations may already be available in corpus format, such as those in the Royal Society Corpus. A central hypothesis is that the increasing specialisation of scientific English and the professionalisation of scientific translation during the LModE period influenced translation practices, leading to shifts in some linguistic features of translated texts, while others remained stable.
 

Die Antrittsvorlesung anlässlich der Habilitation im Fach Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft und Englische Linguistik finde statt am
Montag, dem 14.04.2025, 16 Uhr c.t.
im Gebäude A2 2, Hörsaal 2.02,
Campus Saarbrücken.