A corpus study of loans in translated and non-translated texts

Students training to become translators are usually taught that there are a number of strategies other than literal translation that professional translators employ to transfer meanings from one language to another. One such strategy is simply to borrow words from the source language. There are times when loans are used simply because the target language does not have a word for a culture-specific item that is expressed lexically in the source language, but loans can also be employed deliberately, to convey a foreign flavour to the translation. In order to help translators decide whether the use of loans is appropriate in a given context, it is essential that they be given a translation brief. Knowledge of the target readership and of the purpose of the translation will allow the translator to make informed decisions regarding the appropriateness of employing words that are foreign to the target language. However, there does not seem to be much discussion among translation scholars of the fact that the use of loan words is not a prerogative of translational language. Texts that are not translations may also contain loans, which means translators are sometimes confronted with the presence of foreign words in source texts. Yet little has been written about the relationship between loan words in source texts and translations. How different are translations from source texts in their use of loan words? Are there more loans in translational or non-translational language? What loan languages are used? To what extent do translators preserve loans when they encounter them in source texts? And what happens to source-text loans that have been borrowed from the target translation language? Without the help of a corpus, any attempt to answer questions such as these systematically would be practically impossible. Using a bidirectional parallel corpus of Portuguese and English, the present study compares the use of loan words in translated and non-translated fiction, and investigates the shifts that occur from source to target text in relation to the use of loans. The analysis focuses on the frequency and on the language distribution of loans utilized in a corpus of Portuguese and English literary texts published from 1975 onwards. The results indicate that comparable Portuguese and English literary traditions contrast quite substantially in this respect, and that despite the fact that professional translators seem to be guided by similar norms when working from Portuguese into English and from English into Portuguese, the resulting translations can read very differently