A Comparative Corpus-based Analysis of Collocational Patterns in Self and Other-translators

Abstract

With the dawn of post-colonialism and a surge in migrations, several bilingual authors started translating their original texts into the target language. As a result, translation studies started distinguishing it from other-translations owing to its special status based on various extra-linguistic features. Consequently, now it goes by the term self-translation studies (Anselmi, 2012) - a field of its own. However, none of the studies have distinguished self and other-translations at the basic linguistic level. This study aims to trace and compare the patterns of collocations in other-translations and self-translations with reference to non-translated texts. For this purpose, a corpus-based on a monolingual comparable model (Baker, 1993) and consisting of three further sub-corpora i.e. other-translators, self-translators, and Pakistani writers is used. The lexical collocations model proposed by Benson et al. (1997) provides a theoretical framework for this study. The sub-corpora are tagged by TagAnt 1.2.0 and treated further using AntConc 3.5.8. The findings of the study reveal that self-translators employ more collocate types and they are more homogeneously distributed around a single node in comparison to the other-translators. The results are significant for the theoretical understanding of self-translations and invite more investigations at the linguistic level to set apart the features of the two categories.