Cluster Equivalence, General Language, Language for Specific Purposes
391Parallel Corpora as a source of translational equivalents
As an example of the relationship between the meanings as used in a
Source Language and a Target Language, the English lexeme motor will
be identified in the parallel corpus accompanied by their equivalent forms
as used in the corpus materials, basically in the English-to-Polish texts.
Reference is also made to the direction of the Polish-to-English patterns of
translational equivalence^. The noticeable difference between the two sets
of the paralela data is the frequency of occurrence of the Polish-to-English
translation segments involving the form motor (40 occurrences in
19,964,964 segments) versus English-to-Polish 8527 frequencies from
among the same number of segments. Thus the differences cannot be taken
as fully indicative of the statistically significant inter-language values as
the amount of the material translated from Polish to English is
significantly lower than the one from English to Polish. For that reason,
reference is also made to Polish-to-English examples generated from
http://www.linguee.pl.
The following categories of the equivalence relations are analysed,
which involve normative SL-TL loan equivalents of proper names, clusters
of meanings, exhibiting referential identity and cross-linguistic construal
asymmetry, relevant knowledge frames as mapped on the language
structure, generated from cross-register collocational data and their
distribution, metaphoric language-specific use, including other figurative
uses (simile, metonymy). Each of the categories is exemplified with
instances generated from the SL texts (English/Polish) and their
translational equivalents in TL (Polish/English).
What is also important for the analysis is the Part-of-Speech
distribution of the form motor, which will be indicated both throughout the
analysis as well as in the distributional profile of the form in English,
following the major data presentation.
The form motor is worth investigating as its distribution and use is
varied in general language as contrasted with LSP. As will be observed,
particular lexical and syntactic properties of this form in both languages
determine its LSP use on the one hand and a more varied lexical scope of
application in general language on the other.
The parallel aligned data involving the form motor can be grouped in
the categories mentioned above and exemplified by the corpus materials:
Normative SL-TL proper name loans (examples 4a, 4b) such as (4a)
Eng. Frankfurt Motor Show Pol. Motor Show we Frankfurcie and Pomoc
dla Ford Motor Company Pol. Aid to Ford Motor Company.