Linguistic profiles of translation manuscripts and edited translations

Abstract

A range of studies have pointed to the importance of considering the influence of editors in studies of translated language. Those studies have concentrated on particular features, which allowed them to study those features in detail, but also prevented them from providing an overall picture of the linguistic properties of the texts in question. This study addresses this issue by conducting a multivariate analysis of unedited and edited translations of English business articles into German. We aim to investigate whether translation manuscripts have a characteristically different distribution of lexico-grammatical features compared to edited translations, and whether editors normalize those features and thus assimilate the translations to non-translated texts. Findings related to individual features are in line with the previously observed phenomena of sentence splitting and passive voice, and a general tendency towards increasing readability. In general, however, no profound effect of editorial intervention could be observed, even though there was a slight tendency of edited translations to be more similar to comparable originals.