Bio:

Elif Tokdemir Demirel is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the English Translation and Interpretation Subdivision at Kırıkkale University in Turkey. Elif Tokdemir Demirel was born in Trabzon in 1971. She graduated from Marmara University, English Language Teaching Department in 1994. She completed her MA in Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program in 1997 with an MA Thesis on Computer Assisted Language Learning. She completed her PhD at Middle East Technical University in 2009, English Language Teaching Department. Her dissertation was on the topic of feedback in academic writing. She formerly worked at Karadeniz Technical University, Department of English Language and Literature between 1994 and 2017 and gave undergraduate and graduate courses on Applied Linguistics, English Literature, ELT and Academic writing. She carried out doctoral studies through Fulbright scholarship and post-doctoral studies on corpus linguistics in the USA at Northern Arizona University. She is a Board Member of the European Writing Centers Association. Her research interests are second language writing,  writing center research, corpus linguistics, learner corpora studies, corpus aided translation, teaching technologies in ELT and classroom interaction. In her research she focuses on the interaction between academic writing pedagogy and corpus studies, as well as register variation. She has been carrying out research on corpus linguistics applications in ELT and Translation Studies. She has published an edited books on Online Learning and is currently working on an edited book on Interdisciplinary Academic Writing. She has directed university supported projects on mobile learning an corpus linguistics. She has directed and is currently carrying out TÜBİTAK 2237 projects on classroom interaction management in ELT. She is also acting as a consultant on TÜBİTAK 2209 Studennt Research Project on Translation Studies. She is devoted to research in both Corpus Linguistics and ELT and Academic Writing mainly and loves teaching and assisting learners in research.

Title and Abstract of the Talk: 

Mastering Semantic Prosody in Translation Through Corpus-Based Research: The Case of Literary Translation

This workshop focuses on the relevance of semantic prosody in translating literary works and explores how student translators’ awareness of semantic prosody can be raised by using a corpus based approach through a hands on activity. Especially in the translation of literary texts an awareness of collocations, near synonyms and semantic prosody has great importance, however these concepts pose difficulty for student translators due to their similar denotational meanings but un-interchangeable semantic prosody (Xiao & McEnery, 2006). Semantic prosody has been defined by Louw (1993) as “the likelihood that particular lexical items collocate with one another and a form of meaning which is established through the proximity of a consistent series of collocates”. Semantic prosody is not established with the random occurrence of a word and its collocates but follows a fixed pattern which serves to show the attitude of a writer in an authentic text. Translators are expected to be aware of many aspects of a source text while carrying out a translation task such as culture, function, register, frequency, context and purpose. Equally important however is an awareness of a word’s habitual lexicogrammatically environment. Considering the importance of semantic prosody in the translation process and the opportunities afforded by corpus data, it is worth exploring how corpus data can be converted into evidence of semantic prosody. A corpus based approach allows us to explore a word’s lexico-grammatical environment and make intuitive judgements based on real corpus data. An example is Sinclair’s observations about the lexico-grammatical environment of the phrasal verb SET in, later reiterated in Sinclair (1991). Sinclair used a a corpus of around 7.3 million words and made the observation that generally the subjects of the verb SET in were unpleasant state of affairs such as rot, decay, ill-will, decadence, impoverishment, infection, prejudice, vicious and so on. Moving on from this data driven observation which was made possible through the use of a corpus, the point that corpus data are particularly useful to translators in many ways when lexico-grammar is concerned can be made. While a translator may be aware of the general semantic prosody of his/her native language, he/she may be less sensitive to subtle prosodic distinctions in the foreign source language. Here reliable, real life language data that is presented by a corpus becomes very useful since it can be studied faster and more efficiently using a concordancer which allows making detailed observations about lexical items. The workshop will follow the following steps with the participation of the attendees:

• The literary work which will be the focus of the workshop: James Joyce’s story The Dead” will be introduced briefly by the presenter.
• The attendees are going to be presented with a short passage from James Joyce’s story The Dead.
• The attendees are going to be asked to translate the passage from English to Turkish.
• The attendees are then going to be provided with a short discussion of semantic prosody supported with examples from the BNC corpus.
• At the next step, the attendees going to be asked to re-translate three sentences from the passage in the light of the discussion on semantic prosody
• Lastly, a comparison is going to be made of the translations ‘before and after’ the discussion of semantic prosody, to see if awareness of prosodies had affected the translations in any way.

Keywords: Translation studies, corpus based translation studies, semantic prosody, translator training