14 Thomas Egan
- French and English translated tokens compared
Of the 423 tokens of mellom in the OMC, 393 are translated into both English and
French. In the remaining 30 cases, either the English or French translator (or both)
has omitted the clause or phrase in which the coding of ‘betweenness’ occurs. The
393 original tokens of mellom in the OMC function as tertia comparationis for the
English and French tokens. Translated tokens are either syntactically congruent
or divergent, congruent tokens involving a prepositional coding of the landmark
of mellom, divergent codings a non-prepositional construction. The congruent
tokens were divided into tokens containing between and entre, the standard dic-
tionary equivalents of mellom in English and French, and thus also understood as
lexically congruent, and tokens containing other prepositions. Figure 1 shows to
what extent these three options were chosen by the French and English translators
of mellom.050100150200250300350Between/entre Other prepositions No prepositionEnglish
FrenchFigure 1. Types of translation equivalents chosen by English and French translatorsAt first sight, the strategies chosen by the translators shown in Figure 1 may appear
to resemble each other quite closely. They do, however, differ at the p=0.05 level
of statistical significance when we group together all subtypes of ‘betweenness’,
as is the case in the figure. On the other hand, when we restrict our attention to
the semantic subtypes, in no case do the two groups of translations display sta-
tistically significant differences. Of greater interest in the present study than the
overall resemblance in translation strategies is, however, the question of whether
the two sets of translators choose the same types of coding for the same tokens.
In other words, to what extent do they employ similar strategies for encoding
‘betweenness’? There are nine possible combinations of our three main types, and