Cohesive devices in the corpus de língua portuguesa em tradução: Investigating conjunctions in a contrastive perspective within a text typology

Abstract

This contribution delves into the investigation of cohesive devices in original and translated texts by querying the impact of text and language typologies on the frequency of conjunctions (NUNES, 2014). Data was obtained in the Corpus de Língua Portuguesa em Tradução, a bilingual bidirectional parallel corpus in the language pair English-Brazilian Portuguese. The corpus is comprised of eight text types: research article, political speech, science popularisation, fiction, instruction manual, tourism leaflet, review and educational website. TreeTagger was used for POS tagging and R environment utilized to perform automatic word frequency and significance testing. The results showed highly above expected frequencies in reviews and in political speeches, thus corroborating explicitation hypotheses as to the frequency of cohesive marks in argumentative texts. Also, the explicitation hypothesis as to significantly above expected frequencies of conjunctions in translated texts and in the original and translated texts in Brazilian Portuguese was partially corroborated. Findings also showed relevance in statistically significant frequencies in fictional and educational website texts. As to the former, a tendency for the explicitation of conjunctions in original and translated texts in Brazilian Portuguese was revealed. Conversely, frequencies in the latter pointed to a tendency for the explicitation of conjunctive marks in translated texts in English. The findings mostly contribute to descriptive translation studies concerning language description of English and Brazilian Portuguese in their written modes.