LINGUIST List 10.1469

Thu Oct 7 1999

Qs: Translation, Dialects/Corpus, Korean/Japanese

Editor for this issue: Lydia Grebenyova <lydialinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. robset, Translation in Linguistics
2. Marc Andre Belanger, English Dialects/Oral Corpus
3. Hyun-Sook Kang, Korean and Japanese Comparison

Dear List members,
	
I am investigating why translation is so little used as a source of data in
linguistics, as compared to the traditional database comprising sentences
with acceptability judgments, conversation/text and sovereign monolingual
productions in general. 
	
 I am interested in (as distinct from translation pedagogy, translation
theory per se):

(i) instances of translation being evoked in arguments about
language/thought (I only have a few examples so far, eg the Katz-Keenan
papers (1972, 1978) on the (im)possibility of exact translation,
Jackendoff's (1996) argument to illustrate the thought-language distinction)
		
(ii) use of actual translation (interpreting) data (corpora) in linguistic
inquiry, ie application of linguistic analysis and inference to such data. 
	
I will post a summary. 
	
References:
Jackendoff, Ray. 1996. How language helps us think. Pragmatics and
Cognition 4(1), 1-34.
	
Katz, Jerrold. 1978. Effability and translation. 191-234.
Keenan, Edward. 1978a. Some logical problems in translation. 157-189
Both in F. Guenthner and M. Guenthner-Reutter (eds.), Meaning and
Translation: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches, . London: Duckworth.
	
Sincerely,
	
Robin Setton
	
	
	
	

We are currently preparing an exhibition on language in which we want to 
present, amongst other things, the various dialects of English around 
the world. Does anyone know of a oral corpus on the subject available in 
digitalized form?

Thank you.

Dr Marc A. Belanger
Project Manager
mabcontact.net

I'm working on Korean and Japanese comparison. The two languages share many 
properties in terms of grammar and so I'm having a hard time finding
reversible morphosyntactic contrastive features between the two languages. 
Does anyone know of any reversibly contrastive features? The morphosyntactic 
features should be obligatory.

Thank you in advance.
 	
Hyun-Sook Kang