EHU CRG events are held online (via MS Teams) and are free to attend. Times are GMT. Registration opens three weeks before each event. The link is sent to registered participants the day before the event. If you would like to be added to the mailing list or have any questions, contact the organiser, Costas Gabrielatos ([email protected]).
MEETING #21: Friday 6 November 2026, 2pm
Topic: Corpus Linguistics and Translation
On corpus-based modelling of translator’s responses to repetitions
Abstract
Examining repeated patterns of language use is a cornerstone of much corpus linguistic research, also oriented at translation, where repetition – manifested on several linguistic levels (morphological, syntactic, lexical etc.) – plays a very important role, notably in literary texts (e.g. Mastropierro 2020, 2022; Ruano San Segundo 2016, 2017). Corpus-based studies of the translation of repeated features in literary texts (Čermáková & Fárová 2010; Čermáková 2015; Mastropierro & Mahlberg 2017; Čermáková & Mahlberg 2018, Mastropierro 2020) show that translators tend to avoid repetition in favour of variation. However, corpus-based studies conducted on genres other than literary novels have been scarce, which is most probably due to methodological challenges related to operationalization of repetitions in descriptive and/or explanatory research.
In this presentation, using a custom-designed dataset sampled from the RAPID corpus (Piperidis et al. 2018), we explore how recurrent reporting verbs were handled in the English-to-Polish translation. Using logistic regression modelling we aim to identify the factors—orthographic, syntactic, semantic and textual—that influence either preservation or avoidance of recurrent reporting-verb patterns in the Polish translations.
The findings show that repetition avoidance is linked with indirect and mixed reported speech and with syntactic changes in translation. Random effects indicate that repetition shifts are significantly influenced by verb- and text-specific factors beyond the fixed predictors. As our approach is not devoid of limitations, we also briefly report the findings of our earlier studies conducted on literary texts, where due to genre specificity repetitions were operationalized in a slightly different way. We conclude with implications of the corpus-based modelling studies for broader research on translator’s idiolect or translation style, also considering evaluations of machine translation or AI-assisted translation.
MEETING #22: Thursday 17 December 2026, 2pm
Topic: Corpus Methodology, Accessibility and Museum Discourse
Theodora (Dora) Psoma (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)
Describing Thessaloniki: Building and analysing a corpus of museum audio guides and audio description texts in Greece
MEETING #23: Thursday 4 March 2027, 5pm
Topics: AI use in corpus research, corpus tools
Corpus Sense: AI-enhanced corpus analysis in practice — a demo and hands-on workshop
MEETING #24: Thursday 29 April, 2pm
Topic: TBC
Quentin Feltgen (Ghent University, Netherlands)
Title: TBC
MEETING #25: Date TBC
Topic: Corpus Linguistics and context
Gavin Brookes (Lancaster University, UK)
Corpora, Discourse and Context
