Cohesion and translation variation: Corpus-based analysis of translation varieties

In this study, we analyse cohesion in human and machine translations that we call `translation varieties' as defined by Lapshinova-Koltunski (2017) -- translation types differing in the translation methods involved. We expect variation in the distribution of different cohesive devices which occur in translations. Variation in translation can be caused by different factors, e.g. by systemic contrasts or ambiguities in both source and target languages. It is known that variation in English-to-German translations depends on devices of cohesion involved. We extract quantitative evidence for cohesive devices from a corpus and analyse them with descriptive techniques to see where the differences lie. We include not only English-German translation into our analyses, but also also English and German non-translated texts, representing the source and the target language. Similarities and differences between translated and non-translated texts could provide us with the information on the original of this variation, which might be caused by translationese features