Workshop on Features of Translation Universals

July 21-26, 2008

Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

A Workshop on Features of Translation Universals will be held in conjunction with the 18^th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18).

Organizers:

Eu-Yeon Cho & Soon-Young Kim

Professor

Department of English

Dongguk University

Seoul, Korea

Email: [email protected]

Invited Speaker

Mona Baker (tentative)

Description:

One of the most contentious topics in recent translation studies is the notion of translation universals. Certain types of shifts occur in and by the process of translation, distinguishing translated texts from non-translated texts. Assumptions were offered and efforts were made to test hypotheses on discovering general laws of translation in different pairs of language (Blum-Kulka 1986; Baker 1991, 1993, and 1995; Laviosa-Braithwaite 1995, 1996; Olohan and Baker 2000). A number of potential features have been identified concerning simplification and avoidance of repetitions present in the source text, explicitation, normalization, discource transfer, and distinctive distribution of lexical items (Laviosa-Brathwaite 1998). Identifying general features of translation, however, is by no means easy and empirical studies only began in the late nineties with the introduction of corpus-based approach to translation.

In Korea where the translation studies proper has relatively short history, few empirical studies on the topic has been carried out. The purpose of this study is to test whether the proposed potential features of translation universals holds good in English into Korean translations by adopting the methodology of corpus linguistics. Of the features proposed we will mainly focus on the notions of explicitation and simplification. We will look for such qualities as the lengthiness of texts, over-representation, stronger cohesive and logical ties, stronger use of punctuation, improved topic and theme relation, and syntactic and lexical simplification manifested in translated Korean texts.

Important Dates:

● August  31, 2007: Deadline for submitting the abstract.

● November 30, 2007: Notification of acceptance.

Form and submission of abstracts:

An abstract(.pdf or .doc file) should be up to 3 pages long, including data and references.

The abstract should start with the title of the paper, followed by the text of the abstract.

Please do not include the author's name in the abstract. On a separate page, please give

the author's name, affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, mailing address, the paper title and the session number(title).

Please send the abstract and the author's information to both [email protected] and [email protected].