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New Frontiers in Translation Studies

Sara Laviosa
Adriana Pagano
Hannu Kemppanen
Meng Ji

Textual and
Contextual Analysis
in Empirical
Translation Studies
New Frontiers in Translation Studies

Series editor
Defeng Li
Centre for Translation Studies, SOAS, University of London,
London, UK
Centre for Studies of Translation, Interpreting and Cognition,
University of Macau, Macau SAR
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11894
Sara Laviosa Adriana Pagano
•

Hannu Kemppanen Meng Ji

•

Textual and Contextual

Analysis in Empirical
Translation Studies

123
Sara Laviosa Hannu Kemppanen
Dipartimento LELIA Translation Studies
University of Bari Aldo Moro University of Eastern Finland
Bari Joensuu
Italy Finland

Adriana Pagano Meng Ji

Translation Studies The University of Sydney
Federal University of Minas Gerais Sydney, NSW
Belo Horizonte Australia
Brazil

ISSN 2197-8689 ISSN 2197-8697 (electronic)

New Frontiers in Translation Studies
ISBN 978-981-10-1967-8 ISBN 978-981-10-1969-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1969-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944846

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
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The registered company is Springer Science+Business Media Singapore Pte Ltd.
Contents

1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice

and Back Again. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies: 1993–2003 . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Consolidating Corpora in Translation Studies: 2003–2013. . . . . . 3
1.4 Looking to the Future: Corpora and Holistic Cultural
Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.5 Towards a Corpus-Based Holistic Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.6 Toury’s Discovery and Justification Procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.7 Case Study I: Translating Business in Italian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.8 Case Study II: Translating RIBA in Italian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2 History in Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 27
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 27
2.2 Studying Ideology-Bound Lexis. . . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 28
2.2.1 Ideology as a Research Object. . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 28
2.2.2 Keywords, Keyness and Ideology . . ....... . . . . . . . 29
2.3 Combined Methods: Keywords and Narrative Analysis. . . . . . . . 31
2.3.1 Keyword List as a Starting Point . . . ....... . . . . . . . 31
2.3.2 Historical View on Keywords . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 33
2.3.3 Keywords in Context: Clusters . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 37
2.3.4 Keywords in Narrative Structures. . . ....... . . . . . . . 40
2.4 Conclusions and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 43
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . . 44
3 Keywords—A Tool for Translation Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.2 Concept of Keywords. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.3 Keyword Analysis—A Corpus-Based Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.4 Corpus Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

v
vi Contents

3.5 Different Materials and Different Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

3.6 Large Corpora and Translated Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.7 Style in the Original Text and in the Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.8 Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.9 Sorting Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
3.10 Examples on Analyzing the Aboutness of a Text . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.11 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4 A Contextual Approach to Translation Equivalence . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.2 Contextualizing Translation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.3 Equivalence and Shifts in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.4 Speech Presentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4.5 Speech Presentation in Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4.6 Retranslation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.7 The Golden Age of Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.8 Corpus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.9 Methodology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
4.10 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
4.11 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
4.12 Concluding Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
5 A Corpus Analysis of Translation of Environmental
News on BBC China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
5.2 Research Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
5.3 Computer-Assisted Configuration of Frames in Media Analysis:
An Overview of Analytical Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
5.4 A Frame Analysis of Translation of Environmental Reporting
on BBC China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
5.4.1 Collection of Translated and Adapted News on
Environmental Issues in BBC China. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
5.4.2 Development of Analytical Instruments for Mediated
Environmental Reporting on BBC China . . . . . . . . . . . 137
5.5 Research Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
5.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
5.7 Future Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Introduction

Textual and Contextual Analysis in Empirical Translation Studies is a volume

co-authored by world's leading scholars of empirical translation studies. Since the
early 1990s, corpus translation research has acted as a stimulus to empirical studies
of translation. With the rapid development of large-scale databases and computa-
tional tools for natural language processing, corpus translation research has become
mainstream in theoretical- and practical-oriented translation studies. As with many
new disciplines characterized by the use of digital resources and technologies, there
have been heated debates over the distinction between specific sets of research
methodologies that have come to diversify corpus translation research, such as
corpus-based, corpus-assisted, corpus-oriented or corpus-driven. A central aim of
this book was therefore to explore the viability and productivity of integrating
distinct yet interrelated research methods in recent empirical translation studies. The
papers in this book demonstrate how the collection, quantitative processing and
qualitative analysis of corpus data yield valuable insights into the dynamics of
translation activities and products in particular social and cultural backgrounds.
From the translation of well-established English loanwords in Italy and the
translation of foreign literature in Brazilian’s Golden Age in the 1940s to the
translation of political history in Finland during the Soviet Era and, more recently,
the translation and adaptation of English environmental news on climate change in
mainland China, this book covers latest empirical findings of the translation studies
in Europe, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific. Our joint efforts are geared towards
bridging the long-existing gap in corpus translation research, i.e. the gap between
corpus-based textual analysis and the analysis of the social and cultural context
which gives rise to particular intellectual products such as translations. The case
studies show the divide between textual and contextual analyses in current corpus
research can be closed by exploring the potential of existing and novel quantitative
methods adapted from related fields of enquiry.
The central argument made in this book by four world's leading translation
scholars is that current translation studies especially the corpus-orientated branch
represent a mixed use of qualitative and quantitative analysis (Chaps. 1–3), and an
important feature of latest research developments is the exploration of the

vii
viii Introduction

relationship between detected translational features and contextual variables to fill a

critical gap in current quantitative translation studies. To be specific, the opening
chapter by Laviosa gives an overview of the growth of empirical translation studies
since the 1990s. This is followed by detailed review and discussion in Chaps. 2 and
3 by Kemppanen of important analytical concepts developed in early empirical
translation studies such as keyword analysis. Chapter 4 (Pagano) and Chap. 5
(Ji) focus on the introduction and use of exploratory statistics in quantitative
translation studies. These include descriptive analysis such as keyword list gener-
ation and multivariate analyses (MVA) such as cluster analysis, principal compo-
nent analysis and confirmatory MVA. There is no doubt, in our view, that the
establishment of these new analytical techniques for the empirical investigation of
translation will receive some criticism and become the object of scholarly debate, as
was the case with the development of corpus translation studies since the 1990s
and, indeed, the growth of translation studies as a broad interdisciplinary and
increasingly empirical field of study in its own right.
Chapter 1
Empirical Translation Studies: From
Theory to Practice and Back Again

1.1 Introduction1

When corpora began to be used in a systematic way for the empirical study of
translation, Tymoczko (1998: 657) claimed that the appeal of corpus studies lay in
their potential “to illuminate both similarity and difference and to investigate in a
manageable form the particulars of language-specific phenomena of many different
languages and cultures”. Today, the envisioned role of corpora as invaluable
repositories of data for carrying out contrastive analyses across languages and
cultures is a reality in descriptive as in applied studies. In this chapter I first give an
overview of the evolution of corpus studies of translation from their introduction in
the discipline to current research endeavours. Next, I examine the holistic approach
to translating cultural difference put forward by Tymoczko (2007). I also discuss the
role that corpora can play in raising awareness of “the largest elements of cultural
difference that separate the source culture and the target culture as a framework for
coordinating the particular decisions about culture that occur as the text is actually
transposed into the target language” (ibid: 235). Finally, I consider the application

1
This chapter draws largely on five keynote papers presented by the author from 2008 to 2014.
“Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice and Back Again”. New Perspectives
in Translation Studies, Ningbo University, China, 13–16 June 2014. “Corpora and Holistic
Cultural Translation” I Coloquio Hermēneus. Los estudios de Traducción e Interpretación
basados en corpus, Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación de Soria (Universidad de Valladolid),
26–27 March 2014. http://wp.me/P3SeK5-4I. “A transcultural Conceptual Framework
for Corpus-based Translation Pedagogy” Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies
2010 Conference (UCCTS2010), Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK, 27–29 July. http://www.
lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/corpus/UCCTS2010Proceedings/. “Corpus-based Translation studies:
Theory, Findings, Applications”. Guest lecture given at the Department of Professional
and Intercultural Communication, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration,
Bergen, Norway, 9 October 2009. “Discovery and Justification Procedures in the Corpus-based
Translation Classroom”. Translation Challenges: From Training to Profession, Hammamet,
Tunisia, 28–29 November 2008. http://translationinfo.webs.com/abstracts.htm.

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 1

S. Laviosa et al., Textual and Contextual Analysis in Empirical
Translation Studies, New Frontiers in Translation Studies,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1969-2_1
2 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

of Tymoczko’s approach in translator education with a view to underscoring the

interplay between theory, description and practice within the discipline as a whole.

1.2 Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies:

1993–2003

The introduction of corpora in Translation Studies was conceived within an

empirical paradigm and came to be as a result of the convergence between the
discovery and justification procedures put forward by Gideon Toury (1995/2012)
for the study of translation and the data-driven approach developed by Corpus
Linguistics for the study of languages. The synergy between Descriptive
Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics acted as a stimulus to the creation of a
variety of corpus resources, the development of a descriptive research methodology
and the growth of a line of enquiry that was put forward in the 1980s and gathered
momentum thanks to the availability of corpora. This body of research is known as
the quest for translation universals, which are posited as probabilistic laws of
translational behaviour (Toury 1995/2012). I will now give some details about each
of these achievements of CTS.
One of the first corpus resources designed for contrastive linguistics and trans-
lation studies is the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). It was compiled
at the University of Oslo under the direction of Stig Johansson and served as a
model for the bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese,
COMPARA.2 Another corpus design is the monolingual comparable corpus. An
example is the Translational English Corpus (TEC).3 It was created at the
University of Manchester under the direction of Mona Baker. Another example is
the Corpus of Translated Finnish (CTF). It was compiled at the Savonlinna School
of Translation Studies by Anna Mauranen’s research group. The methodology
adopted by CTS involves a helical progression from the elaboration of descriptive,
interpretive and explanatory hypotheses to inferences about the non-observable
culturally-determined norms that govern translators’ choices.
Initially, research focused on four universals: simplification, explicitation, the
law of growing standardization (largely compatible with normalization) and the law
of interference. Simplification is “the process and/or result of making do with less
words” (Blum-Kulka and Levenston 1983: 119). Explicitation is “an observed
cohesive explicitness from SL to TL texts regardless of the increase traceable to
differences between the linguistic and textual systems involved” (Blum-Kulka
1986: 19). The law of growing standardization posits that “in translation, textual
relations obtaining in the original are often modified, sometimes to the point of
being totally ignored, in favour of [more] habitual options offered by a target

2
Available at: http://www.linguateca.pt/COMPARA/Welcome.
3
Available at: http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/ctis/research/english-corpus/.
1.2 Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies: 1993–2003 3

repertoire” (Toury 1995/2012: 304). The law of interference states that “in trans-
lation, phenomena pertaining to the make-up of the source text tend to force
themselves on the translators and be transferred to the target text” (Toury 1995/
2012: 310). In sum, during the first decade of its life, CTS built upon, refined,
extended and diversified previous research into the regularities of translational
language.
Meanwhile, corpora were making inroads into Applied Translation Studies. In
this area of research and practice, corpora were used mainly as translation aids in
translator training. Corpora were utilized as repositories of data for retrieving
translation equivalents, acquiring content knowledge about specialized subject
fields and developing stylistic fluency and terminological accuracy in the target
language. Translation pedagogy drew mainly on Data-Driven Learning (DDL),
developed by Tim Johns for the teaching of languages (Johns 1991a, b), and on
constructivist principles, which constitute a dominant paradigm in contemporary
educational philosophy and “serve as a strong cornerstone for the development of
student- and praxis-relevant teaching methods” (Kiraly 2003: 8).
More specifically, the DDL approach adopts the principles of Corpus Linguistics
and involves carrying out small-scale projects where students identify problem
areas arising from translation practice, suggest hypotheses and then test them with
their own tutor who has the role of “director and coordinator of student-initiated
research” (Johns 1991a: 3). The approach adopted by the collaborative-
constructivist method combines social constructivism with modern functionalist
theories and expertise studies. The design involves collaborative learning and
project-based activities. The procedure requires that students engage in an authentic
or realistically simulated translation project together with peers (Kiraly 2000,
2003). Summing up, within the empirical paradigm, which can be regarded, in line
with Chesterman (1998), as the most important trend that characterized Translation
Studies in the 1990s, corpora engendered a number of novel syntheses in the pure
and applied branches of the discipline.

1.3 Consolidating Corpora in Translation Studies:

2003–2013

The second decade in the life of CTS is marked by two international conferences
entirely devoted to corpora and Translation Studies. The first was held in Pretoria in
2003, it was entitled Corpus-based Translation Studies: Research and Applications
(Kruger et al. 2011). The second was hosted in Shanghai in 2007, Conference and
Workshop on Corpora and Translation Studies. Of note is also the establishment of
a strong partnership between contrastive and translation studies, in keeping with the
research programme initiated by Stig Johansson in the 1990s and pursued in several
interdisciplinary collected volumes such as Granger et al. (2003). The cooperation
between these two disciplines finds its voice in a series of biennial international
4 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

conferences, Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS). The

first conference was held at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, on 25–27
September 2008 (Xiao 2010). The second one, jointly organized by Edge Hill
University, the University of Bologna and Beijing Foreign Studies University, took
place at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, UK, on 27–29 July 2010. The third
UCCTS conference was held at Lancaster University, UK, from 24 to 26 July 2014.
As regards Descriptive Translation Studies, many new corpora have been cre-
ated in the last ten years or so, as amply testified by Federico Zanettin’s web page4
and his monograph (Zanettin 2012). A novelty is the design of corpora of inter-
preted speeches, the first being the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus
(EPIC),5 and the consequent growth of a new body of research named
Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CIS) (see Setton 2011 for a review). Its main
goal is to unearth the specificity of interpreting vis-à-vis original oral discourse and
written translation in the same target language. This is a line of enquiry that was
first proposed and pursued by Shlesinger (1998, 2009). The creation of new corpus
resources goes hand in hand with the development of methodology and statistical
analyses. These are enriched by contextual data and are becoming more and more
sophisticated thanks to the advancement of technology. As for the range of research
endeavours, the quest for translation universals goes on (Mauranen and Kujamäki
2004; Russo et al. 2006; Espunya 2007; Bruti and Pavesi 2008; Steiner 2005, 2008;
Ulrych and Anselmi 2008; Gaspari and Bernardini 2010; Xiao et al. 2010; Zuffery
and Cartoni 2014). In addition to the four universals mentioned earlier, a new one
emerged, namely the Unique Items Hypothesis (UIH). It states that target-language-
specific elements, which do not have equivalents in the source language, tend to be
under-represented in translated texts, since “they do not readily suggest themselves
as translation equivalents” (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004: 177–178).
Despite growing interest in this ambit of research, a number of scholars
expressed serious criticism about the tenability of the very concept of translation
universal. House (2008), for example, claimed that the investigation of universals is
futile since there are no and there can be no translation-inherent universals. The
reasons for denying the existence of linguistic features of translation per se are as
follows: (a) since translation is an act that operates on language, the universals of
language also apply to translation; (b) translation is inherently language-pair
specific, hence even corpus-based multi-pair comparisons remain agglomerations of
different pairs; (c) the suggested candidates for the status of translation universal for
one particular translation direction need not necessarily be candidates for univer-
sality in the opposite direction; (d) translation universals have been found to be
genre-sensitive, for instance, while there is a tendency towards explicitation in
German translation of popular scientific texts, this is not the case to the same degree
for economic texts; (e) translations may be influenced by the status of the language

4
Federico Zanettin’s web page can be found at the following URL address: https://sites.google.
com/site/federicozanettinnet/cl-htm#TOC-Translation-driven-Bilingual-and-Multilingual-Corpora.
5
Available at: http://sslmitdev-online.sslmit.unibo.it/corpora/corporaproject.php?path=E.P.I.C.
1.3 Consolidating Corpora in Translation Studies: 2003–2013 5

of the source text genre, which in turn may influence the nature of the translation
text genre and also the nature of comparable texts in the same genre (House 2008:
11). Becher (2011) shares House’s critical stance. The departure point for his
corpus study of English-German and German-English translations of business texts
was not the assumption that explicitation is a translation-inherent universal process.
Instead, Becher predicted that every instance of explicitation (and implicitation) can
be accounted for by lexicogrammatical and/or pragmatic factors. His findings
confirmed this hypothesis.
Malmkjær’s (2008) contribution to the ongoing debate on the posited existence
of translation universals is both critical and constructive. She suggests that uni-
versals such as simplification, explicitation and normalization would be better
accounted for by the norm concept and explained on socio-cultural grounds.
Instead, the Unique Items Hypothesis (UIH) is a good candidate for universal status
because it can be explained on cognitive grounds. Indeed, the UIH, which has been
confirmed by studies carried out with unrelated languages (Swedish and Danish on
the one hand, and Finnish on the other), is a phenomenon that is not triggered by the
source text, but seems to arise during the translation process, from the
under-representation in a translator’s mental lexicon of unique features of the target
language. Malmkjær argues that, if the concept of the translation universal is to
retain any theoretical credibility, it would have to be reserved to phenomena such as
the UIH, “for which it makes sense to produce a cognitively based explanation”
(Malmkjær 2008: 57). In addition to the quest for translation universals, other
research projects were pursued during the 2003–2013 decade. They concern the
style of literary translators, the role of ideology in determining translation choices
and the study of Anglicisms, of which more later (see Laviosa 2011 for an
overview).
In Applied Translation Studies corpora continued to be used to retrieve and
examine lexical, terminological, phraseological, syntactic and stylistic equivalents.
They also began to be utilized in Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) (Bowker
2003a, b). So, corpora have been increasingly incorporated in the curricular design
of postgraduate translator training programmes to satisfy the exigencies of today’s
globalized and technologized language industry (Koby and Baer 2003; Zanettin
et al. 2003; Kelly 2005; Ulrych 2005; Olohan 2007; Rodrigo 2008; Beeby et al.
2009). In sum, we can affirm that a coherent interdisciplinary theory combined with
the professional and institutional recognition of corpora as valuable linguistic
resources and translation aids has given rise to an effective partnership that is
playing a crucial role in engendering a culture of research in education.
The question I wish to address at this point is the extent to which corpora have
provided “an opportunity to reengage the theoretical and pragmatic branches of
Translation Studies, branches which over and over again tend to disassociate,
developing slippage and even gulfs”, as was envisaged by Tymoczko (1998: 658).
My view is that the relationship between corpus-based descriptive and applied
studies has been open and reciprocal to a degree. Let me explain what I mean by
this with two examples taken from the quest for translation universals. As we saw
earlier, this line of enquiry was conceived as a descriptive research endeavour. Its
6 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

findings were then projected into Applied Translation Studies where the Unique
Items Hypothesis was tested and confirmed experimentally in the undergraduate
translation classroom to raise awareness among students of what translation entails
(Kujamäki 2004). Also, simplification and explicitation were tested as possible
indicators of translation quality with a view to improving teaching methods and
assessment criteria at postgraduate level. Simplification was found to correlate with
lower-scoring translations and explicitation was found to correlate with
higher-scoring ones (Scarpa 2006).
I believe that these studies, which engage in classroom-based investigations
inspired by the insights provided by the pure branch of the discipline, represent the
beginning of a new trend in Translation Studies. Moreover, I believe it is a
promising orientation not only because it aims to replicate descriptive investigations
and render translation teaching more effective and evaluation more rigorous, but
also because it empowers students to gain a deep and critical understanding of the
process, product and function of translation. Thanks to this knowledge, translator
trainees will be capable of adhering to or innovating culturally-determined norms in
an informed, conscious and responsible way. As Pekka Kujamäki contends, theo-
ries, models, concepts and experimentation with students should have an essential
role in translation pedagogy “not only in research seminars but also and above all in
the translation class: they open a way to novices’ better understanding of their
future status as experts of human translation” (Kujamäki 2004: 199).
In line with this envisioned direction for CTS, I propose that the holistic
approach to translating culture elaborated by Tymoczko (2007) be adopted as a
theoretical framework within which corpora can reengage the pure and applied
branches of the discipline for the benefit of both of them. So, in the second part of
my paper, I first expound the notion of holistic cultural translation and then I put
forward the idea that corpora be used to foster this approach in two interrelated
ways, i.e. through multilingual and multicultural research and pedagogy. The latter
includes translation and language education as well as the training of translator
trainers and language teachers.

1.4 Looking to the Future: Corpora and Holistic

Cultural Translation

The holistic approach to translating cultural difference presupposes that translation

be conceived as an open, cluster concept with blurred edges. This notion of
translation, which Tymoczko calls the ‘cluster concept translation’ (or ‘translation
with an asterisk’), is defined in terms of resemblances between translation and three
forms of cultural interface, i.e. representation, transmission and transculturation.
I shall now define each of these large superordinate categories that partially
encompass, impinge on and illuminate translation.
1.4 Looking to the Future: Corpora and Holistic Cultural Translation 7

As a form of representation, translation offers an image or likeness of another

thing, it stands in place of another entity and has authority to substitute for or act in
place of that entity. Almost all translations are forms of representation, with a few
exceptions such as pseudo translations (or fictitious translations) (Toury 1995/2012:
47–59). As a form of transmission, translation involves different types of transfer
from one language and culture to another. Translations typically relay the content,
language, function or form of the source text. The variability of methods adopted by
translations that privilege transfer is very wide. It ranges from close textual fidelity
to various degrees of manipulation of the linguistic features of the original. Many
factors influence the vast array of transmission procedures adopted in translation
practices, e.g. linguistic asymmetries, translation technologies, literacy practices,
economic conditions, cultural sufficiency or enclosure, receptiveness to difference,
aesthetic norms, taboos about certain types of content, asymmetries in power and
cultural prestige as well as ideology (Tymoczko 2007: 119).
As a form of transculturation, translation is the transmission and uptake of
borrowed cultural forms in the receptor environment and the consequent creation of
new cultural phenomena. Transculturation generally includes such elements as
verbal materials, religious beliefs and practices, social and political organization,
artistic forms as well as aspects of material culture including technology and tools,
agricultural and industrial practices, clothing, food, housing, transport and media
(Tymoczko 2007: 120). In textual domains, transculturation often entails trans-
posing elements of a literary system, e.g. poetics, genres, tale types. It also involves
the uptake of the elements expressed in or carried by language such as discourses
and world views (2007: 121). Lexical borrowing from a donor to a receptor lan-
guage is a form of transculturation that occurs through language contact. Philip
Durkin’s historical linguistic study of loanwords in English (2014) shows how the
rich variety of the English lexis reflects the vast number of words it has borrowed
from languages as varied as Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, French, Italian,
Spanish, Russian Hebrew, Maori, Malay, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Yiddish.
Also, the study of Anglicisms, a linguistic and socio-cultural phenomenon that has
been investigated extensively through corpora, has attracted the interest of a
growing number of scholars in recent years, particularly in Europe, where there is a
need of reconciling the role of English as a European lingua franca with the EU
commitment to cultural and linguistic diversity (Anderman and Rogers 2005;
Furiassi et al. 2012; House 2012).
An insightful corpus-based study of translation as a form of transculturation is
Ji’s (2013) historical linguistic investigation of the introduction, assimilation and
appropriation in early modern Chinese language and culture of the western key term
nation in its modern sense of ‘nation state’. The study covers five decades: 1840–
1850, 1860–1870, 1880–1890, 1900–1910 and 1910–1920. The results show that
during the 1840–1850 decade, the term nation was translated from English, French,
Dutch, German and Italian mostly by words denoting the ethnic composition of a
nation (i.e. zhonglei, zulei, yizu, zuzhong), while the word guomin, which referred to
the people representing a sovereign state, was significantly less frequent. But in the
subsequent decades this pattern changed. The most frequent equivalents of nation
8 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

became guo and bang, which denoted a geopolitical entity. Less frequent were the
words used to refer to the people of a given country (e.g. min and guomin).
The cluster concept translation rests on the assumption that language and culture
are closely intertwined and “culture is the domain where human differences are
most manifest” (Tymoczko 2007: 221). When communicating across cultural dif-
ferences, as Tymoczko argues, it is not sufficient to approach the representation of
culture in a linear, piecemeal fashion and resolve the problems incorporated in
surface elements of the text one by one, sentence by sentence until the translation is
complete (Tymoczko 2007: 233). What is needed instead is a holistic approach. As
Tymoczko explains, “a holistic approach to translating culture will begin with the
largest elements of cultural difference that separate the source culture and the target
culture as a framework for coordinating the particular decisions about culture that
occur as the text is actually transposed into the target language” (Tymoczko 2007:
235).
In order to help translators accomplish such a complex task, Tymoczko offers a
partial repertory of cultural elements that might be taken into account as a guide for
interpreting the source text and for determining the overall representation of culture
in the target text. The inventory comprises:
• Signature concepts of a culture
• Key words
• Conceptual metaphors
• Discourses
• Cultural practices
• Cultural paradigms
• Overcodings
• Symbols.
I will now define each of these large cultural elements in turn and illustrate them
with examples from various languages and genres. As we shall see, many of these
examples are offered by corpus research. Signature concepts express key values in
the social and economic organization of a culture. The words denoting them are
highly connoted and rich in cultural associations. In early medieval Irish texts, for
instance, words belonging to the semantic field of heroism, such as honour, shame,
taboo, fall under the category of signature concepts (Tymoczko 2007). The sig-
nature concepts of contemporary American society can be equated to the values that
American citizens cherish and are encouraged to promote. These are “hard work
and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”,
as we read in the letter that the President of the United States of America sends to
every new American citizen. On the other side of the Atlantic, the liberal values
held by British people today are openness, tolerance, compassion and strength, as
claimed by the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg in his speech delivered at the
Liberal Democratic Party Conference held in York on 9 March 2014.
Key words are words that may point either to the signature concepts of a culture
or to the thematic cultural elements chosen by a writer or speaker to structure a
1.4 Looking to the Future: Corpora and Holistic Cultural Translation 9

given text or a corpus of texts. For example, the strongest key words analyzed by
Norman Fairclough (2000) in the corpus of New Labour texts (which contains a
variety of texts produced under the New Labour Government led by the British
Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1994 to 1999) are: New Labour, new deal, new
Britain, business and partnership, welfare reform (Fairclough 2000: 17–20).
Drawing on the work of cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980),
conceptual metaphors shape the way we understand and experience reality, i.e. they
structure (at least in part) what we do and how we understand what we are doing
(Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). An example of variation in conceptual metaphors
across languages is offered by Ding et al. (2010). Their corpus-based analysis of the
metaphorical representation of the topic FEAR and its Chinese equivalent
KONGJU, reveals that Chinese does not have the English conceptual metaphors
FEAR IS A SUPERNATURAL BEING/A DISEASE/A SHARP OBJECT/A
POISON/A LEGACY/A MACHINE. Moreover, the shared metaphor FEAR IS AN
OPPONENT tends to be used in English to conceptualize the state of falling victim
to fear, whereas in Chinese it is usually used to conceptualize an attempt to
control it.
Ideological discourses are representations and visions of the social world
expressed in speech and writing and as such they motivate action and cultural
practice. They are the object of study of Critical Discourse Analysis, an area of
research which has been investigated extensively through corpora. An example of
such analysis is offered by Fairclough’s research into the political discourse of the
‘Third Way’ in Tony Blair’s speeches from 1998 to early 1999. The Third Way
signifies a programme that was defined by centre and centre-left British govern-
ments as being neither old left nor 1980s right. It was built upon the notion of “the
new global economy”, that was accepted “as an inevitable and unquestionable fact
of life” upon which politics and governments were to be premised (Fairclough
2000: 15,150). In the European Union the discourse of ‘unity in diversity’, which
first came into use in 2000 “signifies how Europeans have come together, in the
form of the EU, to work for peace and prosperity, while at the same time being
enriched by the continent’s many different cultures, traditions and languages.”6
Cultural practices such as naming practices, forms of address and titles, the
naming of kinship relationships play an important role in constructing personal and
social identities and achieving social cohesion. They too may vary across lan-
guages. In English, for example, the word grandfather means ‘father of one’s father
or mother’ and the word grandmother means ‘mother of one’s father or mother’.
The Italian equivalents are: nonno and nonna respectively. But in Thai the word ปู่
(po) means ‘father of one’s father’, the word ตา (ta) means ‘father of one’s mother’,
the word ย่า (ya) means ‘mother of one’s father’, and the word ยาย (yay) means
‘mother of one’s mother’. Similarly, in Swedish farfar = father’s father,
morfar = mother’s father, mormor = mother’s mother and farmor = father’s

6
http://europa.eu/about-eu/basic-information/symbols/motto/index_en.htm.
10 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

mother. In Chinese there are five equivalents of the English word uncle, i.e. shushu,
bobo, jiujiu, guzhang, and yizhang, each referring to a specific family relationship.
Cultural paradigms pertain to humour, argumentation, logical sequencing in a
text or the use of tropes. They tend to vary from language to language and within
the same language over time. For example, a corpus-based study carried out by Niu
and Hong (2010) on rhetorical repetition in English and Chinese print ads published
in two leading newspapers in Singapore shows different patterns. The four most
frequent repetition types in English are alliteration, rhyme, assonance, anaphora,
while in Chinese they are assonance, anaphora, alliteration, rhyme. So, the results
show that English uses more alliteration and rhyme than Chinese and Chinese uses
more assonance and anaphora than English in this particular genre.
Overcodings are “linguistic patterns that are superimposed on the ordinary ranks
of language to indicate a higher-order set of distinctions in language practices”
(Tymoczko 2007: 243). They signal specific literary genres (e.g. poetry or narra-
tive) and modes of communication (e.g. spoken or written). They also comprise
rhetorical devices such as intertextuality, quotation and allusion. For example, the
literary style of Latino writers in the United States is characterized by a constant
code-switching from English to Spanish. As Díaz Pérez (2012: 171–172) observes,
“[b]y introducing Spanish words, phrases or syntactic constructions into their
English texts, they try to evoke the feeling of living on a frontera, of inhabiting two
worlds which can be conflicting and complementary at the same time.”
Within the category of overcodings we also find forms of textual structuring
pertaining to aspects of register, dialects and languages for special purposes. An
excellent example of corpus-based research that throws light into the relationship
between overcodings and cultural context is Meng Ji’s investigation of the
lexico-grammatical features that characterize scientific language in early modern
Chinese. This specialized register was developed by translating scientific texts from
Western languages, most notably English, French and Dutch from the
mid-nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. This was a time
characterized by the expansion of capitalism and imperialism in Asia. Two types of
overcodings were unveiled by Ji’s study: (a) dysillabic word structure, i.e. words
created by combining two existing characters, and (b) functional particles.
Functional particles were created in Chinese to relay the meanings and functions
expressed by the prefixes and suffixes of Latin and Greek origin that characterized
Western scientific writing. Ji’s study reveals two groups of functional particles, i.e.
grammatically modified and semantic-cognitive functional particles. An example of
the former is de, which identifies an adjective and was retrieved from ancient
Chinese literary fiction. An example of the latter is zhe, an abstract term for things,
agents or concepts, which was retrieved from ancient philosophical and historical
texts as well as biographical essays. As Ji observes, while the original affixes
“reflect the systematicity and continuity of the development of modern scientific
language based on ancient Latin and Greek cultures and thoughts” (Ji 2012: 255),
the development of equivalent functional particles in early Chinese scientific lan-
guage “involved a thorough and painstaking re-examination of the target language
1.4 Looking to the Future: Corpora and Holistic Cultural Translation 11

body, searching for expressions of metaphorical references parallel to their Western

counterparts” (Ji 2012: 255).
Finally, symbols are related to the identity of an individual, family, class, nation
or deity (Tymoczko 2007: 145, fn. 28). Indeed, flower symbolism varies from
language to language. Lilacs stand for light and early summer in Sweden but in
Italy they represent envy. In some English villages a lilac branch may signify a
broken engagement (Anderman 2007: 3). Folklore provides many other symbols
and icons. In Indian mythology the word naga describes any kind of semi-divine
serpent associated with water and fluid energy. Nagas are ambivalent deities, they
are believed to bestow wealth and assure abundant crops but revoke these blessings
if offended. An example of a symbol that crosses cultural boundaries is the poppy
flower. During the years that followed the Great War it was adopted as the symbol
of remembrance, especially in the Commonwealth countries. The idea was inspired
by a poem written by the Canadian military doctor and artillery commander Major
John McCrae in memory of his friend, a young Canadian artillery officer,
Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who was killed on 2nd May, 1915 when an exploding
German artillery shell landed near him during the early days of the Second Battle of
Ypres (Corni and Fimiani 2014: 307).
In Flanders Fields7

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

7
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields.htm.
12 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Paris time, the Great
War ended with the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne between the Allies and
Germany.8 The poppy flower is now the emblem of Remembrance Day (or
Remembrance Sunday). This is the Sunday nearest 11th November in the UK and
Canada when the country honours the people who died in the First and Second
World Wars. Every year, on 11th November at 11 o’clock people in the UK observe
a two-minute silence in memory of the fallen. On the same day, poppies, made of
paper or plastic, are worn by veterans and citizens not only in Great Britain, but also
in some European countries such as France and Belgium. (Corni and Fimiani 2014:
307).
As Tymoczko maintains, considering all the above cultural elements helps
translators compare their own culture with the source culture as it is reflected in
texts. In order to make these cross-cultural comparisons translators need to develop
self-reflexivity. It is through self-reflexivity that they will be able to identify those
elements of cultural difference that need to be mediated. As a result, “a holistic
approach to cultural translation rather than a selective focus on a limited range of
cultural elements enables greater cultural interchange and more effective cultural
assertion in translation, allowing more newness to enter the world” (Tymoczko
2007: 233). And, I wish to add, corpora can play an important role in fostering
holistic cultural translation since they can fruitfully be used “to illuminate both
similarity and difference and to investigate in a manageable form the particulars of
language-specific phenomena of many different languages and cultures”
(Tymoczko 1998: 657).

1.5 Towards a Corpus-Based Holistic Pedagogy

How can corpora be used to unearth cross-cultural differences and similarities in

research as in practice? I think an effective way of achieving this goal is to work
towards a multilingual pedagogy that espouses the tenets of holistic cultural
translation and incorporates corpora not only as tools for acquiring technical skills,
but also as resources for developing translingual and transcultural competences that
enable translators to act as self-reflexive, responsible meaning makers in our
increasingly globalized, multicultural world. I recommend that in such envisioned
pedagogy comparable and parallel corpora be explored through discovery and
justification procedures (Toury 1995/2012) so as to infer culturally determined
norms and particularities on the basis of empirical evidence.
What follows is an example of how this teaching method was adopted to
investigate a form of transculturation, i.e. the relationship between the loanword

8
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/world-war-i-comes-to-an-end.
1.5 Towards a Corpus-Based Holistic Pedagogy 13

business in Italian and its English etymon. Loanwords are problematic in translation
as their lexico-grammatical profiles tend to be different across donor and receptor
languages. An Anglicism may, for example, convey only a subset of the senses
expressed by the English etymon. Also, an Anglicism may acquire different con-
notations in the receiving language. As Pulcini (2002: 162) explains, lexical bor-
rowing is a complex phenomenon “because it involves referential, connotative,
contextual and sociocultural components of meaning”. Consequently, the senses
conveyed by words in the donor language may be “kept, altered, restricted or
expanded” in the receiving language (Pulcini 2008: 196). Normally, if an English
word is borrowed in order to fill a semantic gap in Italian, the referential meaning
remains the same, as is the case with the terms agribusiness or bed and breakfast.
But in many other instances, changes tend to occur in the form of restriction or
expansion.
An example of restriction is offered by the term benchmark. In Italian it refers to
a financial market index that enables investors to assess the upward or downward
trend of an investment fund (Pulcini 2008: 197). In English benchmark is used as a
verb and a noun. As a verb it means “to provide a standard that something can be
judged by”. As a noun it means “an amount, level, standard etc. that you can use for
judging how good or bad other things are” (Macmillan English Dictionary for
Advanced Learners 2007). An example of expansion of meaning and change of
word class is provided by the borrowed term backstage. As an English adverb it
means “in the area behind the stage in a theatre, including the rooms where the
actors get dressed”. As an adjective it means “relating to the area behind the stage in
a theatre, including the rooms where the actor get dressed: a backstage pass (= a
special ticket that allows you to go backstage)” (Macmillan English Dictionary for
Advanced Learners 2007). In Italian the noun backstage refers to the area behind
the stage in a theatre and to a documentary that illustrates the technical problems,
atmosphere, emotions and gossip involved in the preparation of a film, event or
theatre performance (Pulcini 2008: 198).
These cross-linguistic asymmetries largely arise from the fact that “meanings are
established in individual languages by contrasts of similar items in semantic fields”
(Görlach 2003: 93). Hence, translator trainees working out of English often find it
difficult to decide when to use Anglicisms appropriately. Since translated texts can
serve as semantic mirrors reflecting meaning across languages (Johansson 2003:
136), they are an invaluable resource for investigating loanwords across donor and
receptor languages. Before moving on to report on a small-scale research project
conducted in the postgraduate translation classroom to raise awareness of transla-
tion norms and the phenomenon of lexical borrowing, I will outline the procedural
steps we adopted in keeping with the methodology elaborated by Toury (1995/
2012) for discovering regularities in translational behaviour.
14 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

1.6 Toury’s Discovery and Justification Procedures

The research methodology proposed by Toury (1995/2012: 31–34) for descriptive

translation studies is articulated in three phases. The first phase starts with the
selection of individual translations or a corpus of translations within the target
culture. Toury’s perspective is target-oriented: translations are texts that belong to
the target culture, they are texts in their own right, not just mere representations of
their source texts. The analysis carried out in the first phase involves the initial
assessment of the acceptability of the individual translations or corpus of translated
texts without reference to the source texts. Acceptability is the extent to which a
translated text adheres to the linguistic and cultural norms prevailing in the target
language for a particular text genre. The opposite concept is that of adequacy. An
adequate translation is one which leans towards the norms of the source language
and culture and contains traces of the textual features of the source text.
The second phase starts with the identification of the source texts and proceeds
to comparing the target texts and their sources in parallel, that is sentence by
sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The aim is to determine target-source relation-
ships, translation problems, translation solutions and shifts. According to Toury
they can be of two kinds: obligatory, which are caused by systemic differences
between the source and target languages, and non-obligatory, which are motivated
by literary, stylistic or cultural considerations.
In the third phase of the analysis, the relationships established between the target
texts and their sources become the basis of first-level generalizations about the
initial norm underlying the concrete way in which equivalence is realized. The
initial norm governs the basic choice which can be made between adequacy (which
involves adhering to source norms) and acceptability (which involves subscribing
to norms originating in the target culture). Adequacy and acceptability are to be
considered as two poles of a continuum where the target text can be positioned on
the basis of its linguistic features examined vis-à-vis the source text and comparable
original texts produced in the target language (Toury 1995/2012: 79–85).
Equivalence is not conceived as an a priori notion that is based on an absolute
criterion of adherence to the source text. This means that in a descriptive study the
researcher will always assume that equivalence exists. What s/he will unveil is the
actual way in which it is realized in terms of the balance between invariance and
transformation. This type of equivalence in turn constitutes a stepping stone for
discovering the concept of translation that informs the target texts examined, this
being defined in terms of the acceptability-adequacy continuum.
At each stage of this process of gradual discovery of facts about the nature of
translation and translating, hypotheses are formulated on the basis of empirical
descriptions and then verified through further procedures that are applied to an
expanding corpus to achieve higher and higher levels of generalization. The pro-
cedures elaborated by Toury are largely compatible with the Data-Driven Learning
approach developed by Johns (1991a, b) in foreign language education. This
method, as we discussed earlier, is also employed in corpus-based translator
1.6 Toury’s Discovery and Justification Procedures 15

Table 1.1 Procedural steps for the analysis of an ever expanding KWIC concordance
Step 1: Initiate Look at the words that occur immediately to the right of the node word to
note any that are repeated; do the same with the words to the left of the node
and decide on the strongest pattern
Step 2: Look at the repeated words to form a hypothesis that may link them
Interpret
Step 3: Look for other evidence that can support the hypothesis formulated in Step 2
Consolidate
Step 4: Report Write out the hypothesis formulated in Step 2 and revised according to the
evidence collected in Step 3 so as to have an explicit, testable version
Step 5: Start with the next most important pattern near the node going through the
Recycle same steps as before, and then look for the strongest pattern remaining on
either side, until there are no repeated patterns
Step 6: Result Make a final list of hypotheses linking them in a final report on the node
word
Step 7: Repeat Gather a new selection of concordances and apply your report on this new
data, going through the same steps and confirming, extending or revising the
list of hypotheses drawn up in Step 6

training, particularly in the teaching of Languages for Special Purpose (LSPs). The
notion of ‘discovery’ plays an important role in Toury’s and Johns’ methodologies.
They both require that students and researchers alike progress from empirical data
to generalization. The basic corpus-based procedure adopted by Johns is to
“Identify—Classify—Generalise” (Johns 1991a: 4) the lexico-grammatical features
associated with words that are particularly problematic for advanced learners. The
main tool for carrying out this analysis consists of KWIC concordance lines and the
procedural steps are those proposed by Sinclair (2003: xvi–xvii) (Table 1.1):
Case study I, in Sect. 7, is an illustration of how Toury’s and Johns’ methods of
enquiry together with Sinclair’s conceptual definitions were integrated in a
corpus-based methodology devised for the student-centred, professionally-oriented
translation classroom.

1.7 Case Study I: Translating Business in Italian

A corpus- and translation-driven investigation was performed by the students

attending a 60-credit postgraduate course in specialized translation at the University
of Bari Aldo Moro during the 2008–2009 academic year. As part of a 3-credit
module devoted to the Language of Business and Economics, I designed a teaching
unit on Anglicisms. The learning objectives were as follows: (a) to become familiar
with corpora as one of the computer-aided translation tools and resources available
to the professional translator; (b) to discover the textual-linguistic norm underlying
16 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

the translation of polysemic lexical Anglicisms; (c) to discover Italian native

equivalents of well-established English loanwords.
The sources of data consist of: (a) a corpus of 71 translated and non-translated
comparable articles taken from the Italian weekly magazine Economy and (b) a
corpus of 71 English articles from The Economist and their translations in
Economy. In the first phase, the lexical Anglicisms contained in the translational
subcorpus were identified. By Anglicism we intend “a word or idiom that is rec-
ognizably English in its form (spelling, pronunciation, morphology or at least one
the three), but is accepted as an item of the vocabulary of the receptor language”
(Görlach 2003: 1). The most frequent Anglicism was business, a well-established
English loanword, having been introduced in the Italian lexicon in 1895, as attested
by the Vocabolario della lingua italiana di Nicola Zingarelli (2004).
Out of nearly 60,000 running words, 37 occurrences of business were retrieved.
The analysis of the KWIC concordance lines revealed five discrete meanings of
business.
I. the work of producing or buying and selling goods or services for money.
II. a high profile area of business where more than one company operates.
III. a. a highly profitable business activity undertaken by a company;
b. investment, deal or transaction made by a company.
IV. a large organization that provides services, or that makes or sells goods.
V. volume of business.
For each of the above meanings the collocation, colligation, semantic preference
and semantic prosody were identified using the definitions provided by Sinclair
(2003: 173–178):
1. identify collocational profile (lexical realizations), i.e. two or more words
occurring near each other in a text;
2. identify colligational patterns (lexico-grammatical realizations), i.e. the occur-
rence of a grammatical class or structural pattern with another one, or with a
word or phrase;
3. consider common semantic field (semantic preference), i.e. a clear preference in
the structure of a phrase for words of a particular meaning;
4. consider pragmatic realizations (semantic prosody), i.e. the special meaning
conveyed by words grouping together, which relates not so much to their dic-
tionary meanings as to the reasons why they were chosen together; it has been
recognized in part as connotation, pragmatic meaning and attitudinal meaning.
The results of the students’ analysis were as follows:
I. Business occurs with words that refer to other human activities, (turismo e
business), the geographical place where business is carried out and the
people of different nationalities that are in business; it forms multi-word-units
(business hub, area business, segmento business, aree consumer e business).
1.7 Case Study I: Translating Business in Italian 17

II. Business occurs with nouns that identify a particular business sector and the
position gained in the market, nouns referring to the major players that
operate in or impact on it, adjectives describing its qualities such as diversity,
profitability or importance.
III. Business occurs with words that refer to the company undertaking a partic-
ular business activity and to the type of activity undertaken, verbs referring to
the changes undergone by a business, adjectives and nouns describing its
main features such as novelty, solidity or volatility; it forms one compound
(core business).
IV. Business occurs with words referring to the people owning or running a
company or to the way in which a company organizes its activities; it forms
multi-word-units (business model, modello di business, business manager,
business partner).
V. Business occurs with words that refer to the monetary value (or turnover) of a
company or business sector:

Al 73enne Ecclestone è rimasto il 25 % del gruppo che gestisce il business da 800

milioni di dollari.
[73 year old Ecclestone still owns 25 % of the group that runs the 800 million dollar
business].
Per contrastare il cambiamento del clima anche gli ambientalisti riscoprono il
nucleare. Un business da 125 miliardi di dollari.
[To counteract climate change, even environmentalists are rediscovering nuclear
power].

All the five senses conveyed by business did not show a clear tendency to
represent either unpleasant or pleasant states of affairs. Hence, the semantic prosody
of business was considered to be neutral. Next, business was examined in the
comparable subcorpus of non-translated articles. The number of occurrences was
nearly double, 74 against 34. The meanings identified were the same, except for
senses II and V, which also referred to illegal business activities. The analysis of the
KWIC concordance lines revealed sameness and difference (examples of the latter
are highlighted in bold):
I. Business occurs with words that refer to other spheres of human activity
(business e società, sport e business, musica e business, business e genetica),
the geographical place where business is carried out and the people of dif-
ferent nationalities that are in business; it forms multi-word-units (business
information, aree di business, clienti business, utenti business). Business is
used in creative collocations: Il business resta in porto [business stays in
the port]; Titanic del business [the Titanic of business]; Il business non è
l’unico quadrante su cui far girare le lancette della vita [Business isn’t the
only dial on which the hands of life turn].
18 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

II. Business occurs with nouns that identify a particular sector and the position
gained in the market, nouns referring to the major players that operate in or
impact on it, adjectives describing its qualities such as diversity, profitability
or importance. Business forms compounds: business travel, social busi-
ness, business online. Business refers to illegal sectors: il business dei falsi
[the business of counterfeits]; i business si chiamano droga, prostituzione,
racket [drugs, prostitution and racket are known as businesses]. Business is
used in creative collocations: un business che si chiama sconto [a business
that is called discount]; un business duro come il teak [a business as hard as
teak].
III. Business occurs with words that refer to the company undertaking a partic-
ular business activity and the type of activity undertaken, verbs referring to
the changes undergone by a business activity, adjectives and nouns
describing its main features such as novelty as well as importance, com-
petitiveness, credibility or profitability; it forms various compounds:
core business, business continuity, business case, business plan. It
strongly collocates with: possibilità, opportunità, occasioni, fare. It is used
in creative collocations and puns: il business in una cannuccia [business
in a straw]; ora faccio business col cuore [now I’m doing business with my
heart]; un Tornado di business [a business Tornado]; ho più di un business
per capello [I’ve got more than one business in my hair].
IV. Business occurs with words referring to the people owning or running a
company or to the way in which a company organizes its activities; it forms
multi-word-units (business unit, unità di business, business development
manager). Business is used in creative collocations and puns: un business
fatto di nuvole [a business made of clouds]; l’Enav e quel business che è
caduto dal cielo [Enav and the business that fell from the sky]; il business
lievita alla luce del sole [business rises in the sunlight].
V. Business occurs with words that refer to the monetary value (or turnover) of a
company or business sector. It is used in creative collocations: Quel
business da 2,5 milioni di sacchi di caffè [That business worth 2.5 million
sacks of coffee]. It refers to illegal activities: Il business [dei falsi] vale
almeno 7 miliardi di euro all’anno [the business of counterfeits is worth 7
billion euros a year]; Cibo Nostro. La Mafia nell’alimentare. Quasi 20
miliardi di incassi per la criminalità organizzata: tanto vale oggi il business
mafioso nell’agroalimentare, nelle sue varie declinazioni [Our Food. The
Mafia in the food sector. Almost 20 billion euros worth of takings for
organised crime: that’s how much the Mafia business is worth in the agri-
colture and food sectors in its various ramifications].
The results show that the collocation, semantic preference, colligation and
semantic prosody of business in translational and non-translational Italian appear to
be divergently similar. Moreover, translators seem to have resisted the influence of
English by limiting the use of business. The next phase involved mapping the
1.7 Case Study I: Translating Business in Italian 19

Italian target texts onto the English source texts. For each of its five meanings, the
following native Italian equivalents of business were retrieved:
(I) il mondo degli affari, gli affari, affari, l’attività, attività commerciali
(II) il settore, l’industria, le industrie
(III) un’attività commerciale, l’attività, le attività delle aziende
(IV) un’azienda
(V) generating the business ! cedendo i prestiti.
The textual-linguistic norm that was inferred from these findings is a preference for
native Italian equivalents. There is also one example (see meaning V above) where the
original non-finite verb phrase, generating business, was translated with an equivalent
expression, cedendo i prestiti (relinquishing loans), which explicates the original
sense. Interestingly, the preference for ‘domestic competitors’ (Görlach 2003) of
business in translational Italian is consistent with Musacchio’s (2005:76) study of a
parallel/comparable corpus of economics articles, which shows a lower percentage of
lexical borrowings in translational versus non-translational business Italian.
The final phase of the analysis was carried out with the subcorpus of original
English articles vis-à-vis the subcorpus of comparable non-translated Italian arti-
cles. It involved identifying the lexico-grammatical shifts in the use of business
across the donor and the receptor language. Unlike in English, business appeared to
have pejorative overtones in Italian when it conveyed meanings II and V. For these
two senses there was, therefore, some evidence of a negative semantic prosody.
Also, while in English business was found to refer to a small or medium enterprise,
in Italian it was found to denote a large company (meaning IV). Finally, in Italian
business was sometimes used in creative expressions that usually appeared in titles
or subtitles and fulfilled the pragmatic function of attention-getting devices.
A further comparison was carried out between the results obtained in class
through corpus-based analysis and the description of business in a sample of
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. This exercise revealed the special contri-
bution of corpora as resources for gaining a deeper understanding of language use
in the target language. Here is the entry for business in the Grande dizionario
italiano dell’uso (GRADIT) (1999–2000):
business /|bIzIns/(bu-si-ness) s.m.inv. ES ingl. [1895; ingl. Business/|bIzns/, der. di busy
“affaccendato”] attività economica, spec. di grande rilievo, molto redditizia: entrare in un
grande b., il b. delle telecomunicazioni | anche con riferimenti a rilevanti attività illegali: il
b. della droga, gli appalti sono un grande b.

GRADIT describes business as an economic activity, especially a high profile

and very lucrative one. The examples reported in the dictionary are: “entering a
large business”, “the telecommunications business”. The entry also states that
business may refer to illegal activities, e.g. “the drug business”, “calling for tenders
is big business”. Students noted that in GRADIT senses II and III had been con-
flated and the negative semantic prosody that was found to be associated with
business was recorded only for sense II. The other senses they had unearthed in
their corpus-based investigation were not recorded.
20 1 Empirical Translation Studies: From Theory to Practice …

The case study presented here focuses on an authentic problem raised by the
students themselves, namely the norm governing the translation of polysemic
Anglicisms in a specific subject domain and text type, i.e. the language of business
and economics in periodicals articles. Students’ evaluations at the end of the course
revealed to me that their learning experience aided by corpora and inspired by a
holistic pedagogy was perceived as ‘professionally empowering’ (Kiraly 2003).
Indeed, they stated that learning through corpora had equipped them with the
specialized knowledge, self-reliance, authentic experience and expertise they need
to acquire in order to become language professionals with highly developed
intercultural communicative competences. Moreover, as a teacher, I felt profes-
sionally empowered too, because I learnt from my students as much as I taught
them about translation and language for specific purposes. Also, I was able to
engage in what Kiraly (2003) calls ‘action research’, which is carried out by
teachers in their own classroom with a view to bringing about long-term changes in
pedagogy.

1.8 Case Study II: Translating RIBA in Italian

In her monograph, Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning, Laura Gavioli (2005) puts
forward a corpus-based methodology for learning English for special purposes that
draws on corpus linguistic theory and integrates contrastive analysis and translation
in the method’s design and procedures. The “search and discovery” approach
elaborated by Johns (1991a, b), the “learner as a traveller” principle proposed by
Bernardini (2000) and John Swales’ “the learner as a spy” metaphor (1990) provide
the foundations of Gavioli’s pedagogy. This is exemplified by an array of learning
tasks she carried out with undergraduate students at the University of Modena and
Reggio Emilia, Italy over a period of ten years. What follows is an illustration of
how Gavioli utilized the proposed teaching methodology in the translation
classroom.
The problems that students often encounter when dealing with languages for
special purposes can be grouped under the category of overcodings. As we saw
earlier, these include forms of textual structuring pertaining to aspects of register,
dialects and languages for special purposes (Tymoczko 2007). A feature of textual
structuring in specialized registers is the use of acronyms. ESP learners often find it
difficult to understand their exact meaning not only because they are not always
recorded in dictionaries and other reference material such as encyclopedias, but also
because of students’ lack of subject-specific knowledge. An example in medical
English is the acronym RIBA, which stands for “recombinant immunoblot assay”.
As Gavioli (2005) recounts, her students encountered this acronym for the first
time when translating a research article on hepatitis C from English to Italian. The
problem they faced was not so much to find a direct equivalent in Italian since they
knew from past experience that English acronyms are generally borrowed in Italian,
but to understand its conceptual meaning, i.e. the values and conventions shared by
Another random document with
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NYKYINEN AIKA.

Vasta vanhalla ijällä,

Kuudenkymmenen kohalla
Tuli mielehen minulle
Arvollinen aikakausi:
Kuink' on Suomi suurin mennyt,
Edistynyt entisestä
Aikamiehen askelilla,
Koetettu on korjaella
Kansan kaikkia tapoja;
Opetusta, sivistystä
Aika on kyllin kylvänynnä
Kerroksihin kaiken kansan.
Niinpä onkin nykyaika
Edistyksen aikakausi,
Paljon entistä parempi,
Kun on koulut kaikenlaiset,
Joka sorttihin sopivat;
Joiss' on oppia otella
Köyhimmänkin kansan lapsen,
Kun on opin ottajata.
Toista oli aika ennen,
Niinä aikoina asiat,
Kun ma lassa lauleskelin,
Nuorten leikit leikittelin.
Siin' oli koko koulupenkki,
Mitä isä iitä neuvoi,
Mitä äitimme opetti,
Ollen oppimattomia.
Ei ne ennen koulut olleet
Kotiseudun saapuvilla,
Kuin on aikoina nykyisnä;
Ennen koulut kaupungeissa
Ruotsin kahleissa kovissa,
Jotk' oli eellä estehenä
Talonpojan poikasillen.
Viel' oli varoinkin vähyydet
Eellä aina estehenä,
Ettei käynyt köyhempien
Olla oppihuonehissa
Opetusta ottamassa.
Ja niin jäin minäkin miesi,
Vaikk' oli haluni hereillä,
Opista osattomaksi,
Kokematta kouluteitä.

KANSANJUHLASSA RAUTALAMMILLA 24 p. heinäk. 1891.

Juhlan julkisen iloksi,

Päivän kuulun kunniaksi
Sanoisin pari sanaani;
Jos ois jäänynnä jälellen
Joku muutama murunen
Vielä Wäinön kanteleesta.
Jos tästä jotakin oisi
Täksi hetkeksi huvia
Kansanjuhlan viettäjillen;
Koska oomme ensikerran
Kukin lähtennä kotoa
Pitämähän pikku juhlaa
Rautalammin rantamailla,
Saviniemellä samalla.
Vaikk' ei joutaisi kotoa,
Kun ompi kesäinen kiire,
Poutakin mitä parahin,
Heinäaika herttaisempi,
Lämmin läikky taivahasta,
Aurinko varista valju.
Vaan ei auta aina olla
Yksitoikkosen tokelon,
Ettei vähäsen välihin
Hanki hiukkasen huvia
Taitavinkin talonmiesi
Sekä myös vakaiset vaimot,
Kansa nuori kasvavainen,
Koska meillä ensikerran
Ompi juhla omituinen,
Kansallinen kaikin puolin,
Niinkuin sillä on nimikin.
Vaan on juhlalla jalompi
Tarkoituskin, tärkeämpi,
Ettei varsin huvin vuoksi
Kesän kiirettä hukata,
Herttaista heinäntekoa
Maamme miehet milloinkana.
Vaan on aina asialla
Monta muutakin mukana
Tarkoitusta tehtävänä.
Niinp' on mieli meillä kanssa
Näillä seuran näytelmillä
Saada vähänkin varoja,
Pikkusenkin pennilöitä,
Että saataisiin Savohon
Omituinen oppipaikka
Kansan kasvavan opiksi,
Savon kansan suosituksi.
Sanon vieläkin sanasen
Kansan puolesta puhelen,
Koska niinkuin kylvömiehet
Oomme opiston aluksi,
Nuoret niinkuin niittomiehet
Siitä lyhdettä sitovat.
Kyllä toivois kyntömiehet
Varsin vaivansa näöstä
Hedelmiä herttaisia.
Niinkuin soisin siemenetkin
Pidettävän puhtahana,
Samoin soisin suotavaksi
Kansanopiston olevan,
Ettei sitä rikkaruohot,
 Uuden ajan uudet henget,
Opin tuulet turmeleisi;
Vaan ois vaka vanha pohja,
Jonk' ei vaivu vuoliaiset,
Eikä arkut alta murru
Kovissakaan koittehissa.
Näitä toivoisin todella
Kaikkein korkeimman kädestä
Alkavallen aikeellemme.

KANSANOPISTOLLA ÄÄNEKOSKELLA LUKUVUOTTA

ALKAISSA 3 p. marrask. 1899.

Kun ma satuin kulkemahan

Ajan pitkäisen perästä
Äänekosken äyrähiä
Matkustaissa matkojani,
Heti äkkiä älysin,
Kuink' on koreeksi kohonna,
Kaikki paikat kaunistettu,
Kohta niinkuin kaupungiksi.
Onpa myöskin oivallinen
Rakennuskin rakennettu,
Kaivattu Kansanopisto,
Kosken rannallen rakettu.
Sepä miellytti minua,
Että käydä katsomassa
Uutta laitosta laveeta,
Koulua joka kohalta.
Vielä otti opettaja
Varsin vastahan ilolla.
Pian tultihin tutuksi,
Oudot yhtyi ystäväksi.
Vielä vaati hän minua
Etten kiiruhda kotia;
Koska kohta lukuvuosi
Alkaapi taas askeleensa,
Pidetään taas pikku juhla
lloksemme iltapuolla.
Tämä miellytti minua
Jäädä juhlaa kuulemahan,
Opintyötä alkavata.
Vielä vaati hän minua
Että rupeisin runollen,
Lausumahan lauseheni
Juhlan julkisen pidosta.
Tuosta tuumahan rupesin,
Kiirehesti kirjoittelin,
Runosanoiksi sanelin,
Mitä tuli mieleheni,
Kuinka minun mielestäni
On tää armias asia,
Ett' on saatu Suomellemme
Oivalliset oppikoulut,
Kaivatut Kansanopistot
Keski-Suomen salomaillen,
Jossa vielä vanhempana,
Aivan aikamiehenäkin
Saavat oppia otella,
Järjen jousta jännitellä
Opinteillä ollessansa.
Onpa syytä onnitella
Nykyajan nuorisota,
Kasvavata kansan lasta,
Kuinka sill' on oppikoulut
Tarjona joka tilassa
Halvimmankin kansan lapsen;
Kun vaan halu on hereillä
Nuorisossa nousevassa,
Kansassamme kasvavassa.
Toista oli aika ennen,
Kun ma lassa lauleskelin,
Koulut kaikki kaupungeissa
Ruotsin kahleissa kovissa;
Ei ne ollut ensinkänä
Kansan lasten käytettävät,
Niinkuin se nykyinen aika
Ompi opin aikakausi;
Ovat siitä osalliset
Kaikki kansan syvät rivit.
Siispä suosi hyväksesi
Opin teillä ollessasi,
Suomen poika, Suomen tytär,
Ota oppi otsahasi,
Kuin on tarjona tavara;
Siit' oot kunnon kansalainen,
Missä miestä tarvitahan,
Oppineena oiva miesi.
 Sitten kasvavi sinusta
Kunnon isä, kunnon äiti,
Nuoren kansan kasvattaja;
Siit' on isällen iloa,
Suomi-äidillen suloa,
Lahja suuri lapsistansa,
Ompi heillä opistansa.

VANHAN MIEHEN MIETTEHIÄ LOMAKURSSIEN LOPUSSA

Helsingissä 20 p. elok. 1898.

Ennenkuin me erkanemme
Tästä kuulusta kylästä,
Herttaisesta Helsingistä,
Oisi mielessä minulla
Lause muuan lausuttava.
Jos vaan oikein osaisin
Kertoella kaikin puolin
Tästä seurasta somasta,
Kun on tänne suuri joukko
Tullut Pohjolan periltä,
Savon mailta mairehilta,
Kaikin paikoin Karjalasta,
Suomemme syviltä mailta
Lukematta likiseudut.
Hauska on olomme ollut
Lomakurssin kuulijana.
Kaikk' on seurahan sopinut,
Vieronut ei viereltänsä
Ylempi alempoansa;
Tuli veljet vierahista,
Tutut tuntemattomista.
Kukin muisti mielessänsä,
Että ollahan emosta,
Saman Suomen synnyttämät,
Saman kantamat kanaset,
Vaikka häävyimme hajallen
Yli suuren Suomen saaren.
Olis kyllin kiittämistä
Vielä meillä vierahilla,
Kehumista kielestäkin;
Koska sorja Suomen kieli
Kelpas aina keskustella
Kaikkein kuulijain seassa,
Enkä kuullut ensinkänä
Viskattavan venskan päätä,
Rupatusta ruotsalaista
Tässä seurassa somassa.
Suomen kieltä suosi kaikki
Sekä miehet että naiset,
Rouvat, viinit ryökkynätkin.
Toista kuuleepi kadulla
Herraisessa Helsingissä.
Jos vaan jotakin kysäiset,
Heti venska viskatahan
Ensimäiseksi etehen,
Että luulisi lopulta
Muillen maillen matkanneensa.
 Olis paljonkin puhetta
Kyllä Helsingin kylästä,
Mitä on saanut silmä nähdä,
Korva kuulla opetusta
Luennoista, laulannoista,
Järjen aavalta alalta.
Täällä tiede, täällä taide,
Täällä taiteitten tavarat
Nähtävänä näyttelyissä,
Joist' on paljon oppimista,
Katsomista kaikenmoista;
Vielä eillehen enemmän
Sydänmaassa syntyneillen;
Joiden johteitten avulla
Kukin kunnon kansalainen
Saapi mieltänsä mitellä,
Järjen jousta jännitellä
Sekä korkeimman kotona
Että majassa matalan.
Vielä kiitän viimeiseksi
Teitä herroja hyviä
Luennoista luontevista,
Jotk' on meitä miellyttännä
Oppilaana ollessamme
Kahden viikon koulussamme.
Entäs se soria soitto,
Laulut Suomesta suloiset,
Jotka on joka tilassa
Kaikununna korvissamme.
Nepä vielä vanhaltakin
Liikutti lamaisen rinnan,
Mielen muuttivat medeksi,
Että rupesin runollen.
Kuinka sykkivi sydämet
Kansan nuoren kukkivaisen,
Itse kukin arvatkaatte,
Jot' en kertoa kykene.
Ja ei ole minulla muuta,
Hyvät herrat, kanssaveljet,
Parempata palkkiota
Luennoista luontevista,
Töistä, toimista jaloista,
Kuin tää puhe puuttuvainen.
Runo-muotohon mukailtu,
Yksinkertainen yritys.

NUORISOSEURAN KOKOUKSESSA 8 p. huhtik. 1901.

Mitäs nyt sanoiksi saisin

Tällä hetkellä huviksi
Nuorisollen nousevallen,
Kansallemme kasvavallen,
Lapsillemme laulun-aine,
Josta oppia olisi,
Elämällen esimerkki.
Vaan ei vanhalla minulla,
Lapseksi jo lauhtuneella,
Ole ehkä opettamista,
Kun en koulusta kokeita,
Opinteiltä ollenkana
Ole saanut osakseni;
Kun on koulu kokemuksen,
Sen oon läksyt läpikäynyt,
Esimerkit näistä nähnyt:
Mikä hedelmä hyvällä,
Minkä palkan paha saapi.
Niinpä nuori nousevainen
Kukoistava nuori kukka,
Isän ilo, äidin sulo,
Suomen lempi-lapsukainen,
Kun sä alat askeleesi,
Maalimassa matkustuksen,
Koeta ensin kaikin puolin
Kuuliainen, nöyrä olla,
Varsinkin sä vanhemmillen,
Olla isällen ilona,
Äidin sulo suosijana.
Kunnioita kumpaistakin,
Se on käsky Korkeimmalta,
Julistettu Jumalalta.
Vaan kun matkas maalimassa
Tulet täällä alkamahan,
Siinä tarkka tarvitahan,
Että vaarat vältetähän.
Maailma on iso koulu,
Alaltansa avarakin.
Sill' on teitä sinne tänne
Matkustaissa monet seurat;
Sill' on lakut laitettuna
Kaikin paikoin kulkijoillen.
Mikä viepi väärätiellen,
Mikä oikeella pysyypi,
Kunnon miessä kulkijana.
Vielä nuoria varoitan,
Kasvavata kansan lasta:
Että entistä enemmän
Pakenetten pahat seurat,
Jotka juuri nuorisoa
Tuhansia turmeleepi,
Viepi väärällen polullen,
Tiellen tuiki turmiollen;
Himot häjyt sytyttääpi,
Monenmoiset pahennukset,
Turmeleepi nuorten tavat.
Siispä seuroja valitse,
Ettei ehtisi jo tehdä
Teille tuiki turmiota.
Ota muistohon mukaasi
Varoitukset vanhan miehen.
Tekin nuoret nousevaiset,
Kansalaiset kaikkityyni,
Joillen jo nykyinen aika
Tarjoopi opin tavarat
Kaiken kansan kerroksihin,
Sitä suosi hyväksesi,
Suomen poika, Suomen tytär.
Sitten tuleepi sinusta
Kerran kunnon kansalainen,
Joka kestät koetukset
Vastuksissa vaikeissa,
Joita ehkä elämässä
Saapi kansamme kokea
Ehkä entistä enemmän.
Vielä viimeksi sanelen,
Ilokseni ilmoittelen,
Kuinka nyt nykyinen kansa
Kaikkityyni koulitahan,
Otetahan opinteillen,
Kaikkityyni tyttäremme
Ilman säädyn eroitusta.
Kodin koulu ensimäinen,
Se on hyvä koulukurssi,
Se on oppi oivallinen;
Hyvän äidin hyvät lahjat,
Joita jättää lapsillensa.
Siis on äitien sivistys
Kaikin puolin kiitettävä:
Äidit saatava siveiksi,
Tavoiltansa taitaviksi.
Ne on kansan kasvattajat,
Hyvän kodin kaunistajat,
Kotilieden lämmittäjät.
Jospa opit oivalliset
Kantais kaunihin hedelmän
Kansassamme kaikin paikoin
Nuorisossa nousevassa,
Sitten Suomen suuri äiti
Saisi ilolla ihailla
Ettei työ oo turhaan tehty,
Kasvatukset kansan lasten,
Ohjaukset opinteillen.
Näistä toivomme tulevan
Vielä kansan kasvavaisen,
Oppineemman, oivallisen,
Jok' on Suomella sulona,
Isänmaallensa ilona.
VIELÄ VIRTTÄ VIINAN TÖISTÄ.

Soisin seutuni hyväksi

Rautalammin raittihiksi,
Vielä kaiken Suomen kansan
Kunnialla kulkevaksi
Ohi viinan villitysten.
Tuollen turmallen pahallen
Juoppoudellen julkeallen
Pian loppu tehtäköhön
Turman päivä tuotakohon,
Ettei se enää enemmän
Kasvattaisi kansan lasta
Veisi väärällen polullen
Tiellen tuiki turmiollen.
Rakas nuori, nousevainen.
Kasvavainen kansan lapsi,
Kukoistava nuori kukka,
Heinä puhtonen, heleä,
Sua varsinkin varotan.
Kun sä alat aamupuolta
Elämääsi astuskella,
Katso kaikella mokomin,
Ettet koskaan eksy sinne,
Joss' on juomat juotavana,
Viinat valtoa pitävät.
Karta tätä kauhistusta,
Ettei pettäisi sinua,
Karta viinan kauppiasta,
Kuten pahinta petoa.
Jos sä tahdot tarkka olla,
Aivan oikein eleä,
Kunnon miessä kulkijana,
Elä viivy viinan luona,
Puhele putelin kanssa,
Se sun pääsi pyörryttääpi
Silmiäsi summentaapi.
Vaikk' on kirkas katsannolta,
Hyvin loistava lasissa,
Putelissa pulska juoma,
Vaan on myrkky mielessänsä,
Petos luonnossa peräti.
Se on monta kunnon miestä
Vienyt väärillen poluillen,
Teillen tuiki turmioillen,
Tuskan tuiman tutkijaksi.
Vaivojen valittajaksi.
Se on vaivoja syviä
Vielä tuonut vaimoillenkin,
Laittanut lapsi paroillen,
Kuin on miesi mieletönnä,
Humalassa hurjapäänä.
Kun hän kotia tuleepi,
Heti vaimonsa ajaapi
Ulos kohta kuutamellen,
Lapset kaikki karkoittaapi
Viluhun värisemähän
Itkemähän ilman alle.
Ota nuoriso opiksi
Varoitukset vanhan miehen,
Lähe raittiuden polullen,
Puhtahitten teillen taivu,
Siivoin seuroihin sijotu.
Pidä liittosi pyhänä,
Lupauksesi lujana,
Sanasi kuten sinetti,
Jot' ei ikinä rikota,
Eikä voida väärennellä.
Silloin rauha on kotona,
Rauha kyläsi kujilla,
Onni kaiken kansan mailla,
Onni rinnassa omassa.
Vielä vähän virteheni
Lausun toisesta tavasta,
Haastan tuosta joutavasta,
Mikä miehissä näkyypi,
Nykyajan ammatissa.
Kuinka piiput pistetähän,
Rinnoillensa riippumahan,
Paperossit paistumahan
Aivan hammasten välihin.
Mikä miesten mielen väänti,
Mikä turmeli totiset,
Kuin he jonni joutavata
Myrkkykasvia kaluvat,
Heinät pahat polttelevat,
Ratki rahansa hukaten
Sekä saaden sairautta.
Siis on sulla nuori miesi
Kohta tehtävä totinen
Elinaikainen parannus,
Ettet ilmoissa ikänä,
Kuuna kullan valkiana
Piipun polttohon yritä,
Tupakkia tunnustele.
Miks' eivät ota opiksi
Miehet naisilta tapoja,
Vaimoväeltä käytöksiä:
Ne ei vieri viinan luona,
Eikä pullollen puhele,
Horjuvina hihkuele
Keskellä kylän kujia.
Eik' oo noilla naitavilla
Piippua piettävänä
Hampahissa haikuinensa.
Miks' ei miesikin samaten
Saisi järkeä totella,
Hyljätä hylyt tapansa,
Jättää huonot huvitukset.
Tätä kaikillen kehotan
Suomen suurellen suvullen,
Kansalleni kallihillen,
Että hyvä hyvin oisi,
Pahan valta pakeneisi
Kansastamme kaikin puolin.
Siihen toivon siunausta
Yksin Luojalta hyvältä,
Armon kaiken antajalta,
Pahan voiman voittajalta.

MAAMIESPÄIVILLÄ RAUTALAMMILLA 12 p. lokak. 1903.

Koska taaskin koossa oomme

Näillä juhlilla jaloilla,
Päivillä pidettävillä;
Näähän ovat oikioita,
Jaloimpia juhliamme
Töistä, toimista monista,
Askarista, ammateista,
Meillen maanviljelijöille;
Joissa saanemme sanella,
Keskenämme keskustella
Mit' on mikin hyväks' nähnyt
Talonpojan tehtävissä,
Kokemuksen koulussansa
Ollessansa oppilaana.
Viel' on meillä viisarina
Näissä juhlajutteluissa
Oppineet opettamassa,
Akronoomit antamassa
Monenmoista neuvoansa