《Translation+and+Cognitive+Structures1》.pdf

169 Josef Schmied* Translation and Cognitive Structures1 Abstract This project is based on a corpus of English and German source and target texts, ranging from contemporary literature to scientific textbooks. We try to create a ma- chine-readable and aligned corpus which will allow us to discover and categorize trans- lation equivalents for a number of linguistic items, such as prepositions, subordination, deictic elements, metaphors or culture-specific structures. On this basis we look for regularities in the configuration of factors that influence equivalent choices for each of the phenomena in question. Apart from theoretical insights into contrastive language structures as well as cognitive aspects of the translation process, the purpose of the pro- ject is to discover and categorize prototye and non-prototype equivalents in two close- ly related languages. Research results could, for instance, be applied to bilingual lexico- graphy or other language learning and translation aids. 1. A new approach to contrastive and cognitive issues: an example German and English are genetically and typologically closely related languages. Thus language learners and bilingual language users (e.g. 1 The project group consists of a team at Chemnitz (led by Josef Schmied) and a team at Cambridge (led by Kirsten Malmkjær) and it works parallel to other translation work- groups (cf. Johansson/Hofland 1994). The basic research design was agreed on in February/March 1993, when I worked as an honorary research fellow at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics in Cambridge. I have to thank all support- ing agencies that have enabled me and my colleagues to pursue the project so far (the German Research Association/DFG, the British Council and the Technical University of Chemnitz-Zwickau), all the c