WORD ORDER VARIATION IN ADVANCED STUDENTS’ TRANSLATION TASKS: A LEARNER CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS

Abstract

In this article, we analyze a learner corpus of English-to-French translation tasks produced by advanced students enrolled in their final year of a professional translation master’s program. Specifically, we investigate their use of so-called non-standard, non-SVO word order structures: clefting, pseudo-clefting, dislocation, extraposition, and inversion. We aim to confirm students’ tendency to overuse SVO word order in their translations in comparison with original French and to provide a finer-grained analysis of their (non-)use of non-standard structures. Complementary analyses on a corpus of machine-translated texts and a corpus of professional translations provide further comparisons. Thanks to an approach where corpus material is used to assist students in the development of their translation skills, all these results are meant to have pedagogical value, by highlighting the specificities of student translations to help them write more authentic texts that take into account language use related to word order. The comparison with machine-translated texts is intended to help students develop post-editing skills. Keywords: translation training, translation quality, word order variation, specialized translation, post-editing