Empty links and crossing lines: querying multi-layer annotation and alignment in parallel corpora

Abstract

Translation shifts can be informative in various ways. Amongst other things, they can point to typological differences between languages or be indicators of properties of translated text like e.g. explicitation or normalisation. Detecting translation shifts in parallel corpora is thus a major task from the viewpoint of translation studies. This paper presents an analysis of translation shifts in a parallel corpus (English-German). It offers an operationalisation of queries which can exploit multi-layer annotation and alignment in order to detect various kinds of translation shifts across category boundary lines and empty alignment links. The paper furthermore discusses the shifts and links them to certain translation properties.