Features of translation on papers of anesthesiology: a comparison between the results of a parallel and a comparable corpus

Abstract

The research on “features of translation” has been favored by the observation of electronic corpora with the aid of computational tools. Since most studies about the features of
translation have been based on literary texts, this article aims at discussing the presence/absence of “simplification” and “explicitation” in scientific papers. In order to do so, we will present a brief theoretical review on the universals of translation and on corpus-based translation studies. Then we will present the data gathered from a parallel and from a comparable corpus, consisting, respectively, of articles translated to English and articles originally written in English. The results have shown that the discussion on the presence/absence of translation features could, or should, also be guided by the comparison between different genres such as the literary and the academic ones.