MDA analysis of translated and non-translated parliamentary discourse
María Calzada Pérez, María del Mar Sánchez Ramos
Abstract
Contributing to De Sutter and Lefer’s (2020) new agenda for empirical translation studies (TS), we attempt to both benefit from Biber’s (1988) multidimensional analysis (MDA) and incorporate a translational perspective into Biber’s work. Regarding the former goal, we aim to avoid reductionism in corpus-based translation studies (CTS) (De Sutter & Lefer, 2020) by mainly abiding by the stages set in Biber’s (1988) work. Regarding the latter, the present chapter supplements the relatively limited number of MDA-oriented studies (see Berber-Sardinha & Veirano-Pinto, 2014, 2019), where the translation prism is absolutely underrepresented. The data used for this study come from The European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive of Parliamentary Discourse (ECPC). More specifically, we resort to subcorpora of 2005’s translated (i.e., EP-EN-TT-05) and non-translated (i.e., EP-EN-ST-05) speeches from the European Parliament (as published in the Official Journal of European Union) and from the House of Commons (i.e., HC-05, as published in Hansard). Aided by Nini’s Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) and Brezina’s Lancaster Stats Tool Online (LSTO), subcorpora interventions are processed and compared to Biberian dimensions. The chapter yields tentative exploratory results, which, as in all empirical studies, are to be pursued by further quantitative and qualitative analyses.