Translation and editing: a study of editorial treatment of nominalisations in draft translations

Abstract

Though editing and revising are integral parts of translation, their effects on the language of the final translated text have scarcely been studied. The phenomena we observe in translated text are usually attributed to ‘the translator’, even though the multitude of agents involved in translation may also be responsible for them to various degrees. This paper defends the use of manuscripts in corpus-based Translation Studies by investigating differences in nominalisation between unedited and edited translations. Using a corpus of manuscript and published German translations of English business articles, I investigate what may motivate editors to replace a nominalisation in the translation manuscript by a verb to match the English source text. For this purpose, I analyse differences in the process types of the nominalised source text verbs and the structure and information density of the nominal group the nominalisation appears in. The findings show that editors exert extensive and systematic influence on the translated text. Crucially, the analysis shows that, if we only consider the published version of a translation, we might consider sentences as literal translations which in reality have undergone a considerable amount of shifts while passing through the stages of translation.