Linguistic translation and comparative linguistics

Linguistic translation and comparative linguistics

• Comparative linguistics’ branches are divided into 3 groups:
• Phonetical
• Lexical
• Morphological and syntactic

Aspects of comparative linguistics

• Synchronical

• Diachronical

Linguistic translation and comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics, formerly Comparative Grammar, orComparative Philology, study of the relationships or correspondences between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a common ancestor. Comparative grammar was the most important branch of linguistics in the 19th century in Europe. Also called comparative philology, the study was originally stimulated by the discovery bySir William Jones in 1786 that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, and German.

Practical aim of comparative linguistics

1)Translation practice

2)Compiling dictionaries

3)Teaching foreign languages

History of comparative linguistics

• The end of the 18th century up to the middle of the 19th century, which is called the beginning of comparative research
• The end of the 19th century- the period of the neogrammarian studies, when linguistics started comparing living languages
• The beginning of the 20th century up to the present – the period of structural and functional approaches to language

The relationship between linguistics and translation studies

This relationship of linguistics towards translation studies can be twofold: we can apply linguistic findings to the practice of translation, and we can create a linguistic theory of translation.

the first instance

In the first instance, a branch of linguistics like sociolinguistics can tell us something about the connection of language with the social situation and this something can then be applied in the act of translating. As an example, we could take a dialect of English in prose, which should be translated differently from the standard language of the receiver. In translation, this is a problem, because many cultures do not have a dialect with comparable cultural connotations. There is a possibility to replace the regional dialect by a sociolect, which is a dialect characteristic of a social and not of a regional group. In other translations, the dialect can disappear. In such a situation, linguistics can provide some information, which can help a translator to decide about a solution.

The second instance

In the second instance, we do not apply linguistic theory to parts of the text which we are translating, but we apply it to the whole concept of translation. The translator focuses the translation on the target text receiver, who is different from the source text receiver in language, culture, world knowledge and text expectations, therefore he adapts the source language text to a different social group with what we might, for the sake of terminological comparability, call its “natiolect”.

Comparative linguistics

Comparative Linguistics (examples: French dialects):

• Picard :
• CHAT: « ka » rather than « sha » (chat : ch'cat [ka]),
• MERCI: [ke] / [ki] > [che] / chi (ex : merchi).
• BOIS: [ei] > [oi] > [oe] > [o] (le bois : ch'bos)
• Francian :
• BOIS: [ei] > [oi] > [we] > [wa] : le bois
• MERCI: [ki] > [si] (merci)

Dialects of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries,

Comparative linguistics

Comparative Linguistics (examples: languages):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method