Research

Projects

Katrin Menzel currently works as an interim professor (English linguistics) at Mannheim University. She was a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University until July 2024. She studied Conference Interpreting, Translation Studies and Linguistics in Saarbrücken (Germany) and Cambridge (UK). In her PhD thesis she focused on English-German contrasts in the use of cohesive devices as text-structuring strategies. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, English historical linguistics, specialized languages, translatology, constructional schemas of complex single-word and multiword lexical units and the interface between lexicon and syntax. She is involved in two corpus-linguistic projects of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1102 (Information Density and Linguistic Encoding) and has submitted her habilitation thesis on English historical linguistics in May 2024 (completion expected in 2024).

- SFB 1102 (Sonderforschungsbereich / Collaborative Research Centre "Information Density and Linguistic Encoding") - Project B1: Information Density and Scientific Literacy in English – Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives, s. Artikel im Campus Web-Magazin der Universität des Saarlandes und Interview mit der Royal Society of London

In this project, we study linguistic densification in the evolution of scientific writing in English from the 17th century to the present. We have built large corpora of scientific texts and one of the corpora we use is the Royal Society Corpus consisting of all digitised texts of journals such as the "Philosophical Transactions" and the "Proceedings" of the Royal Society of London published between 1665 and 1996.

- SFB 1102 - project B7: Modelling Human Translation with a Noisy Channel

Translations have been shown to exhibit specific properties, linguistic traces left in the translation product by the translation process due to simplification, explicitation, normalization, shining-through etc., also known as "translationese" (or "interpretese" for oral translation). A unifying explanation of the observed effects is still lacking. The goal of this project is to explain (aspects of) translational choice from the perspective of rational communication. Specifically, we represent translational choice by a noisy channel model, taking into account relevant factors such as mode (oral vs. written), expertise (professional vs. learner) and cross-linguistic variation as well as translation complexity.  In a wider perspective on language use, the project will contribute insights on language production, notably the commonly assumed desire to maximize the utility of a message or text for the recipient while at the same time keeping the production effort within a reasonable limit.

German-English contrasts in cohesion - Towards an empirically-based comparison (GECCo), DFG-Projekt (2011-2017) - Kohäsion im Deutschen und Englischen - ein empirischer Ansatz zum kontrastiven Vergleich, s. Artikel zum Projektabschluss im Web-Magazin der Universität des Saarlandes.

We have published a book ("GECCo - German-English Contrasts in Cohesion") on the results of the GECCo project: GECCo - German-English Contrasts in Cohesion Insights from Corpus-based Studies of Languages, Registers and Modes Kerstin Kunz, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, José Manuel Martínez Martínez, Katrin Menzel und Erich Steiner  Band 355 der Reihe Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

CroCo project: Sprachliche Eigenschaften von Übersetzungen - eine korpusbasierte Studie (DFG-Projekt). I was involved in this project (2005 - 2010) as a student assistant.

Follow me on ResearchGate: www.researchgate.net/profile/Katrin_Menzel

​​​​​Other professional activities

- Member, Programme Committee, 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), Turin, Italy, 20-25 May 2024

- Member, Scientific Committee, Translation in Transition 2024, 7th edition, Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University (Georgia) 23-25 September 2024

- Co-editor of Mannheim papers in multilingualism, acquisition and change (MAPMAC)

Forschungsaufenthalte an ausländischen Institutionen und Partneruniversitäten

(Erasmus+ Personalmobilität, jeweils ca. 2 Wochen)

- Cardiff University, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Juli 2019

- University of Turku, Faculty of Humanities, School of Languages and Translation Studies, April 2019

- Royal Society of London (Aufbau von Kooperation zum Korpusausbau des Saarbrücker Royal Society Corpus), Juni 2017

- School of History, University of St Andrews, UK (Projektteam: „Publishing the Philosophical Transactions – the economic, social and cultural history of a learned journal, 1665-2015“), März 2017

Paper presentations, conference participations

2024: 

K Menzel: "Late Modern English microbiology texts in the Royal Society Corpus", Online talk at Corpus-linguistic Approaches to Scientific Discourse - SHE seminar on corpus linguistics. Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Faculty of Medicine,  University of Oslo, 10 October 2024.

K Menzel: "Noun+noun compounds and verbal complements as non-normalised features in Late Modern English scientific translations", Paper presentation at 7th Translation in Transition conference, Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University (Georgia), 23-25 September 2024.

K Menzel: "Exploring word formation trends in written, spoken, translated and interpreted European Parliament data – A case study on initialisms in English and German", Paper presentation at LREC-COLING 2024 (ParlaCLARIN IV Workshop on creating, analysing and increasing accessibility of parliamentary corpora, 20 May 2024), Torino.

2023

K Menzel: "Der weibliche Blick auf die unsichtbare Welt – Wissenschaftskommunikation zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts im Bereich der Mikrobiologie" in Sektion "Interkulturelle Kommunikation und mehrsprachige Diskurse: Wissenschaftskommunikation interkulturell, intermedial und interdisziplinär", Presentation at Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik, Mainz, 20-22 September 2023.

K. Menzel: "Initialisms in English and German European Parliament Data", Book of Abstracts, Presentation at 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10), IdS Mannheim, 18-21 July 2023.

K. Menzel: "Bacterial viruses, adventitious fungi and sporiferous Anthrax bacilli – adjective noun constructions in texts from microbe hunters in 19th century Royal Society publications" Paper presentation at 3rd International Conference on Historical Medical Discourse (CHIMED-3), London 11-12 May 2023.

K. Menzel: "Word formation patterns in specialised discourse from Late Modern to Present Day English" , Presentation at Forschungskolloquium "Current Trends in Linguistics", Anglistische Linguistik/Diachronie, Universität Mannheim.

K. Menzel: "Initialisms in Late Modern English scientific writing" Paper presentation at symposium “Historical English Word-Formation”, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, February 2023.

2022

K. Menzel: "Word formation patterns reflecting discipline-specific communicative needs in scientific writing throughout the 20th century", at 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL25), Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, 1-5 August 2022.

K. Menzel: "Word formation and cohesion in specialized languages", presentation at workshop "Word Formation and Discourse Structure" Institut für Germanistik, Leipzig, 05-06/05/2022

K. Menzel: "Standardsprache und Dialekt im saarländisch-lothringisch-luxemburgischen Dreiländereck", Presentation at Zweite internationale Winterschule für Bachelorstudierende Deutsch als Fremdsprache: eine soziolinguistische Reise durch europäische Sprachlandschaften, University of Turku, Finland, 28/02/2022.

K. Menzel: "A diachronic analysis of change-of-state verbs in scientific writing", presentation at 44th Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS), AG4 - Change of State Verbs – Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, 23–25/02/2022.

Annemarie Verkerk, Stefania Degeatano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel, Tania Avgustinova, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Luigi Talamo. Information status investigated using surprisal: differences across syntactic roles and referential expressions in European languages. Presentation at 44th Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS), February 2022.

2021

Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel and Elke Teich (2021). The diffusion of scientific terms — tracing individuals’ influence in the history of science for English. Poster presentation at the 5th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature ,11 November 2021, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (online), Association for Computational Linguistics.

Katrin Menzel, Pauline Krielke & Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb: Structural complexity in scientific journal articles across time — from negative clausal expressions towards adjectival negative prefixes. Presentation at Workshop on Complexity and Register (CAR21), 19 November 2021, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Katrin Menzel, Heike Przybyl, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski:  "EPIC-UdS - ein mehrsprachiges Korpus als Grundlage für die korpusbasierte Dolmetsch- und Übersetzungswissenschaft", Presentation at TRANSLATA IV - 4. Internationale Konferenz zur Translationswissenschaft, Innsbruck, 20-22/09/2021.

Luigi Talamo, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Yuri Bizzoni, Tania Avgustinova, & Annemarie Verkerk: Surprisal and information structure of human referents across syntactic roles: evidence from European languages, Presentation at 54th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2021), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, 30/08 – 03/09/2021.

K. Menzel: "Standardsprache und Dialekt im saarländisch-lothringisch-luxemburgischen Dreiländereck", Presentation at Winterschool: "Eine soziolinguistische Reise durch europäische Sprachlandschaften -  Internationale online-Winterschule für Bachelor- und Masterstudierende Deutsch als Fremdsprache" University of Turku, Finland, March 2021

K. Menzel: "Wortbildungsaspekte in Rechtstexten aus übersetzungswissenschaftlicher Perspektive" and "Medical Discourse in Late Modern English – Insights from the Royal Society Corpus", Talks at Deutsches Seminar and English Department, University of Zurich.

2019

Katrin Menzel: "Insights from the Royal Society Corpus on English Academic Writing" at 5. Saarbrücker Fremdsprachentagung  - Fifth Saarbrücken Conference on Foreign Language Teaching. October 2019

Yuri Bizzoni, Elke Teich, Tom Juzek, Katrin Menzel and Heike Przybyl: "Found in interpreting: Detection and analysis of translationese using computational language models" at Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS), Saarbrücken, October 2019

Alina Karakanta, Katrin Menzel, Heike Przybyl and Elke Teich: "Detecting linguistic variation in translated vs. interpreted texts using relative entropy" at 49th Poznań Linguistic Meeting - PLM2019 (thematic session "Empirical investigations into the forms of mediated discourse at the European Parliament"), September 2019

K. Menzel: "The Royal Society Corpus as a teaching and learning resource for English for academic and specific purposes", Anglistentag, September 2019, Leipzig

Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel, Pauline Krielke and Elke Teich: "Grammar and Meaning: Analysing the Topology of Diachronic Word Embeddings" at 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2019, Florence, Italy August 2, 2019.

K. Menzel: "Noun phrases with informationally dense premodifiers in a diachronic corpus of English academic writing", Workshop on the English Noun Phrase, Vienna, 11-13 July 2019.

Participation: International Corpus Linguistics Conference 2019 - Cardiff University,  22 – 26th July 2019.

Katrin Menzel & Elke Teich: "Medical discourse across 300 years: insights from the Royal Society Corpus ", at 2nd International Conference on Historical Medical Discourse (CHIMED-2), 10–12 June 2019.

K. Menzel: "Scientific eponyms throughout the history of English scholarly journal articles", ICHLL10, 10th International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ICHLL)  Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, 12-14 June 2019.

Marie-Pauline Krielke, Stefania Degaetano Ortlieb, Katrin Menzel, Elke Teich: "Paradigmatic change and redistribution of functional load: The case of relative clauses in scientific English" at Symposium on Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar, 22 June 2019, Edge Hill University.

Participation: KäTu XVII Symposium on Translation and Interpreting Studies (KäTu2019). University of Tampere 12-13 April 2019.

K. Menzel: "Daltonian atoms, Steiner's curve and Voltaic sparks – the role of eponymous terms in a diachronic corpus of English scientific writing", Poster presentation at 41. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS), Bremen, 6-8 March 2019.