ABSTRACT

Originally defined as an aura of meaning associated with words used together in a particular context, semantic prosody is a complex linguistic concept, and there is no agreement among researchers as to its precise definition and level of operationalization (word, phrase, text or discourse). Although there have been some studies on semantic prosody in translation, their findings are rather inconclusive and limited to individual words and phrases. Also, there has been no research on semantic prosody conducted so far in Polish-English translation. Intending to fill in this gap, this paper, grounded in corpus linguistics, showcases the role of semantic prosody in a selected English-to-Polish translation found in the Paralela corpus. More precisely, we present and reflect upon a peculiar translation error resulting from a mismatched semantic prosody and discuss its wider implications on translation quality, translation reception and translation teaching. Thus, apart from presenting new empirical findings, the study also provides an opportunity for reflection on the application of the concept of semantic prosody in descriptive and explanatory research on translation as well as in translator training.

摘要

语义韵律最初被定义为与在特定上下文中一起使用的单词相关的意义光环，是一个复杂的语言概念，研究人员对其精确定义和操作化水平（单词、短语、文本或话语）没有达成一致意见. 尽管已经有一些关于翻译中语义韵律的研究，但他们的研究结果相当不确定，并且仅限于单个单词和短语。此外，迄今为止还没有对波兰-英语翻译中的语义韵律进行研究。为了填补这一空白，本文以语料库语言学为基础，展示了语义韵律在 Paralela 语料库中选定的英语到波兰语翻译中的作用。更确切地说，我们提出并反思由不匹配的语义韵律导致的特殊翻译错误，并讨论其对翻译质量、翻译接收和翻译教学的更广泛影响。因此，除了提出新的实证研究结果外，本研究还为反思语义韵律概念在翻译的描述性和解释性研究以及翻译培训中的应用提供了一个机会。