'n Ondersoek na Afrikaanse vertaalkenmerke in 'n korpus koerantberigte
Date
2009-03
Authors
Roos, Deirdre
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
In this translation corpus study a monolingual comparable corpus of translated and
nontranslated Afrikaans newspaper articles from Die Burger are compared with the use of WordSmith Tools 4. WordSmith Tools generates statistics, word lists and concordances that can be sorted in a variety of ways. The data generated for the
translated and nontranslated subcorpora are then compared.
This study follows on a translation corpus study of Afrikaans rugby articles by RG Bam (2005), which found that translated language differs from nontranslated language and that it also differs from the results for English in a similar study. The difference between the findings for English and Afrikaans is attributed to the commonality of the rugby articles. For this study the domains are extended to include topical articles, arts and entertainment, business news, foreign news and sport (rugby, athletics, soccer, cricket, bicycling, hockey and gholf). With the extended
domains, my results are similar to the previous Afrikaans study regarding type-token ratio, average word length and lexical density, but not with regard to average sentence length and convergence. My finding on sentence length agrees with the finding for English newspaper articles. However, it is clear that Afrikaans translated
articles differ from Afrikaans nontranslated articles and that Afrikaans differ from the
way in which English translated articles differ from English nontranslated articles.
A further extension on Bam's study is the use of an automatic Afrikaans part-ofspeech
tagger that was developed by CTeXT in 2005. The tagged data was applied with good results to the calculation of lexical density and in determining the number of pronouns in the distinct subcorpora.
Because corpus translation studies is a relatively young field, the methodology
suggested by Laviosa-Braithwaite (1995) for corpus studies in English is tested to
see whether it is applicable to Afrikaans. The methodology is in the form of hypotheses. Certain aspects are investigated easily by means of WordSmith Tools, but other aspects, such as die occurrence of superordinates, is not so readily
applicable to the corpus methodology.
Description
Thesis (MPhil (Afrikaans and Dutch))--Stellenbosch University, 2009.
Keywords
Dissertations -- Afrikaans language, Theses -- Afrikaans language