Stance bundles in englishtopolish translation: A corpusinformed study

Abstract

In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the textual fit of English-to-Polish translation of a peculiar type of multi-word units known in corpus linguistic literature as lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999). Inspired by a study conducted by Grabar and Lefer (2015), we used the English-Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pęzik 2016) and the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) to extract and explore the use — in terms of frequency distributions — of the Polish equivalents of selected English lexical bundles expressing attitudinal and epistemic stance. More precisely, we used the NKJP corpus to check whether the Polish equivalents are typical of contemporary Polish as found in native texts. The results of this corpus-informed study revealed a high number of Polish equivalents, both single- and multi-word units, expressing stance. Also, the results showed that the majority of Polish equivalents are frequently used in native Polish texts and therefore they can potentially help enhance the textual fit of translations. Finally, we discussed limitations of the methods and corpora used in this preliminary study and presented suggestions on how it can be pursued further in the future to better explore the usefulness of lexical bundles for translation teaching and translation practice. To that end, we also presented proposals of in-class translation activities.