Fredagsseminar: Michael Oakes

Fredagsseminar:
Michael Oakes and Meng Ji
University of Sunderland / Uni Research Bergen and University of Tokyo:

Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Abstract
Despite the growing interest in the use of corpus material and methodologies in translation research, there is a lack of a systematic description of the various statistical tests that may be adapted from corpus linguistics in general for the purpose of translation research. I will present results from two chapters from a forthcoming edited volume designed to address this issue.

The chapter by Michael Oakes covers various ways of describing a text, whether in original or in translation, considering measures of vocabulary richness, how to find which linguistic features most typify a text, growth of vocabulary with text length, and whether or not the corpus is uniform in composition. Meng Ji and Michael Oakes’ joint chapter then compares two translations of Cao Xueqin’s classic Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” using the whole range of commonly-used “bivariate” statistical texts for comparing one group (or corpus) with another.