Department of Afrikaans and Dutch

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Browsing Department of Afrikaans and Dutch by Author "Bam, Robert Graham"

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    A corpus-driven quantitative analysis of translated and original texts in 'Die Burger'
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2005) Bam, Robert Graham; Feinauer, A. E.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dept. of Afrikaans & Dutch.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: With the emergence of the global village concept over the last two decades, the role of the act of translation has increased in importance. As people became aware of the value and significance of texts in foreign languages, it ignited an interest in the act of translation. Translations were no longer regarded as inferior, but rather worthy of study. Prior to the emergence of interest in translation, the translation process had received little attention, but now slowly became the focus point as researchers sought to unravel its idiosyncrasies. No longer were researchers merely prepared to accept the fruits of the process, but they questioned how the process came about, why it happened and which circumstances, both internal and external, influenced it. This research set out to investigate the similarities and differences between sports texts originally written in Afrikaans and translated sports texts that were translated from English into Afrikaans. Prior research on this topic had pointed to a marked lexical difference between original and translated texts. It was further postulated that the differences and similarities were caused by the translation process itself and were inherent to it. The current research attempted to determine these similarities and differences by means of an electronic lexical analysis of the original and translated corpora using Wordsmith Tools. The results confirmed the findings done in prior research, namely that there were lexical differences between original and translated texts. This study indicated that the differences were not significant for the study at hand. It further indicated that the reason for the lack of a significant difference was due to the common nature of the subject matter and a large degree of shared information. It was further suggested that the statistics could have been different if the commonality of topic had not been present. Further research would need to be undertaken by expanding the size and scope of the corpora so as to be able to reach conclusions based on a greater variety of texts. At the same time this research suggested that a qualitative analysis of the texts should be done to support the quantitative findings of the research.