Tracing Translation Universals and Translator Development by Word Aligning a Harry Potter Corpus

Abstract: For the purpose of this descriptive translation study, a translation corpus was built from roughly the first 20,000 words of each of the first four Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, and their respective translations into Swedish. I'Link, a new type of word alignment tool, was used to align the samples on a word level and to investigate and analyse the aligned corpus. The purpose of the study was threefold: to investigate manifestations of translation universals, to search for evidence of translator development and to study the efficiency of different strategies for using the alignment tools. The results show that all three translation universals were manifested in the corpus, both on a general pattern level and on a more specific lexical level. Additionally, a clear pattern of translator development was discovered, showing that there are differences between the four different samples. The tendency is that the translations become further removed from the original texts, and this difference occurs homogeneously and sequentially. In the word alignment, four different ways of using the tools were tested, and one strategy was found to be more efficient than the others. This strategy uses dynamic resources from previous alignment sessions as input to I'Trix, an automatic alignment tool, and the output file is manually post-edited in I'Link. In conclusion, the study shows how new tools and methods can be used in descriptive translation studies to extract information that is not readily obtainable with traditional tools and methods.