Quantifying the Frequency of Translation Shifts in Serbian-English Translation: A Case Study of Two Non-Fiction Texts

Abstract

This paper combines the methodology of corpus linguistics and qualitative research in the domain of translation studies, with the aim to determine the frequency of translation shifts, i.e. the degree of departures from formal correspondence, as well as translation strategies used for the shifts. The parallel corpus consisted of two non-fiction Serbian-English translations from which 5000-word random sample sentence pairs were excerpted: Formulas of Love by Zoran Milivojević and The History of Serbian Culture by a group of authors. Each sentence pair was annotated for translation strategies and structural changes: the annotation scheme distinguished among 8 translation strategies at the word or phrase/clause level (e.g. cultural substitution) and 5 types of structural changes (e.g. voice change), based on Baker (2011). The results show that 22.85% of the source text words get adapted in the target through shifts, which may represent a piece of evidence supporting the Skopos theory.

Keywords

• corpus linguistics
• translation strategy
• translation shifts
• parallel corpus
• descriptive translation studies