Kenny's (2001) recent work in corpus-based translation studies focuses on lexical creativity in source and target texts. The aim is to establish whether or not English translators of German fiction typically exhibit 'reserve in rendering unusual and mannered imagery and word choice' as suggested by Vanderauwera (1985:108) in her study of Dutch novels in English translation. A prerequisite for this kind of study is the identification of lexically creative points in source texts. In Kenny (2001) this is done on the basis of frequency and distribution of types, and collocations, in the source texts of a specially constructed and aligned German-English Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts, or Gepcolt (see Kenny 1999). Many of the two hundred or so creative hapax legomena, writer-specific types, and collocations thus identified turn out to be figurative uses of language and can be analysed as metaphors, metonyms, or ironic manipulations of the canonical forms of collocations or even compound words.

This paper focuses on the translation of such figurative uses of language and attempts to establish a link between the likelihood of the translator 'normalising' such points of creativity and the kind of creative process that underlies them in the first place. It may, for example, be easier to recreate an unconventional metaphor in the target language than it is to exploit a collocational norm in the same way as the source text writer did. Particular emphasis is put on methodology, and the author is anxious to stress that figurative uses of the source language are accessed only indirectly, through investigation of distributionally marked word forms and collocations. Given the limited size of the corpus involved (one million running words in each of German and English), comparative data (in the guise of the British National Corpus and the corpus holdings of the Institut für deutsche Sprache) are also necessary in order to establish what is genuinely unusual and what is rare in Gepcolt, simply because of the size of the sample. Finally, I stress the need to distinguish between conventional and unconventional metaphor (Kittay 1987) in particular, in studies of linguistic creativity.

The software used to manipulate Gepcolt is Mike Scott's WordSmith Tools, for monolingual phases of the study, and David Woolls' Multiconcord for bilingual phases.

References

Kenny, Dorothy (1999) 'The German-English Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts (GEPCOLT): A Resource for Translation Scholars' Teanga 18:25-42.
Kenny, Dorothy (2001) Lexis and Creativity in Translation. A Corpus-based Study Manchester: St. Jerome.
Kittay, Eva Feder (1987) Metaphor: its cognitive force and linguistic structure Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Vanderauwera, Ria (1985) Dutch Novels Translated into English: The Transformation of a "Minority" Literature Amsterdam: Rodopi.