Language contact and translation: dependency relations as a lens for source language influence in fiction

Abstract

Recognising translation as a site of language contact, this study utilises measures of dependency relations, namely dependency distance and dependency direction, to examine the influence of the source language in translation and how this influence is shaped by directionality and language pair. The data was obtained from a large-scale bidirectional multilingual corpus of original fiction and its translation across ten language pairs, with English serving as either the source or the target language in each pair. The findings reveal a balanced presence of source language influence in both translation directions, as shown by the patterns in variation of the mean dependency distance. However, this influence was not observed across all language pairs, which suggests that its manifestation was affected more by language pair than by directionality. At the same time, this study identifies a tendency for the characteristics of the translated fiction’s dependency direction to align with the word order convention of the target language, indicating that the influence of the source language is limited. Additionally, this study found that simplification, a widely recognised “translation universal”, may not be a unique property of translational language. Rather, it results from language contact, where the linguistic properties of the source language permeate the target language, causing the latter to reflect structural features of the original text.