This paper investigates English supplementive ing-clauses (e.g., Hitler exploded, demanding examples.) in German and Swedish contrast. The material consists of popular non-fiction originals and their translations from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS) (version 0.1). The results show that coordination is the most frequent correspondence of supplementive ing-clauses in German and Swedish translations and originals. Like the supplementive ing-clause, a coordination is a compressed and semantically indeterminate structure. The other major correspondences include subordination, main clause and prepositional phrase. German translators more often use main clauses than Swedish translators, which seems to be related to an increasing German tendency for parataxis rather than hypotaxis. A number of German and Swedish instances involve different kinds of explicitation, including conjunctions and German pronominal adverbs.

Acronyms are prevalent and increasingly frequent both in English (Leech et al. 2009: 212–213) and other languages, such as German (Steinhauer 2000: 1), a development which mirrors the increasing societal prominence of science/technology and politics/business outside specialized domains (Kobler-Trill 1994: 200). Although acronyms allow brief and unambiguous communication among experts, they also decrease transparency for non-experts both when it comes to retrieving the full form of the acronym (e.g., LSD) or its referent (UNFCCC). The potential lack of transparency is further compounded in translations due to cultural differences. However, few previous studies have addressed the translation of acronyms and none from a corpus-based perspective.

This study investigates the use of acronyms in English originals and their translations into German and Swedish, comparing forms, functions and distributions across the languages. A major outcome will be a typology of translation strategies and acronym use in the three languages. The material consists of an English-German-Swedish popular non-fiction parallel corpus currently being compiled by the authors. This genre covers, for instance, popular science and biographies, and the texts are aimed at informing and entertaining non-specialist audiences. Therefore, writers and translators need to strike a balance between brevity and transparency without compromising accuracy or alienating readers.

Preliminary results suggest that acronyms most often occur as noun phrase heads (When IBM introduced…), but they are also frequent in more complex structures such as English premodifiers (PGP encryption) and German (UN-Klimakonvention) and Swedish compounds (NKVD-officer) (cf. Ström Herold & Levin in preparation). They also occasionally form part of new words (NAFTA-style). This flexibility is likely facilitated by the simplex forms of acronyms (Fleischer & Barz 2012: 284).

The first-time mentions of acronyms in texts are of particular interest. Based on our popular non-fiction corpus, knowledge of some frequent acronyms is presupposed (e.g., DNA tests), others are given as appositive noun phrases alongside the full form (The chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (usually known as DDT) […]) (cf. Biber & Gray 2016: 202–207), while some receive more extensive meta-linguistic comments (WYSIWYG, pronounced "wiz-ee-wig," an acronym for "What you see is what you get."). This is also found in translations, which can be either more or less explicit than the original:

(1a)  Complete the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), and you're in.

(1b) den CAPTCHA […] (den ”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", also den ”vollautomatischen öffentlichen Turingtest zur Unterscheidung von Computern und Menschen") [’i.e. the ”completely-automated…”’]

(1c) captcha-rutan (ett robotfilter för att skilja människor från datorer) [’the captcha-box (a robot-filter to tell …’]

The translations of first-time mentions vary greatly between German and Swedish target texts. Important factors are the target audience’s (assumed) culture-specific knowledge and their knowledge of English. Our acronym typology will consider structural and pragmatic features and their relevance to translation.

References

Biber, Douglas & Bethany Gray. 2016. Grammatical complexity in academic English. Linguistic change in writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fleischer, Wolfgang & Irmhild Barz. 2012. Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Kobler-Trill, Dorothea. 1994. Das Kurzwort im Deutschen. Eine Untersuchung zu Definition, Typologie und Entwicklung. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair & Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in contemporary English. A grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steinhauer, Anja. 2000. Sprachökonomie durch Kurzwörter: Bildung und Verwendung in der Fachkommunikation. Tübingen: Narr.

Ström Herold, Jenny & Magnus Levin. In preparation. The Obama presidency, the Macintosh keyboard and the Norway fiasco. English proper noun modifiers in German and Swedish contrast. Paper presented at BICLCE, Vigo, September 2017.

This article presents the Nordic Tweet Stream (NTS), a cross-disciplinarycorpus project of computer scientists and a group of sociolinguists interestedin language variability and in the global spread of English. Our research integratestwo types of empirical data: We not only rely on traditional structured corpusdata but also use unstructured data sources that are often big and rich inmetadata, such as Twitter streams. The NTS downloads tweets and associatedmetadata from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. We first introducesome technical aspects in creating a dynamic real-time monitor corpus, andthe following case study illustrates how the corpus could be used as empiricalevidence in sociolinguistic studies focusing on the global spread of English tomultilingual settings. The results show that English is the most frequently usedlanguage, accounting for almost a third. These results can be used to assess howwidespread English use is in the Nordic region and offer a big data perspectivethat complement previous small-scale studies. The future objectives include annotatingthe material, making it available for the scholarly community, and expandingthe geographic scope of the data stream outside Nordic region.

Nouns used as premodifiers have tripled over the last two centuries in English (Biber, Grieve & Iberri-Shea 2009: 187), and proper nouns are increasing in frequency in writing, a change which is particularly noticeable with acronyms (Leech et al. 2009: 212). In German and Swedish, which disallow nouns as premodifiers (*Dylan bootlegs; *Australien Projekt) and instead use either hyphenated or solid compounds (Dylan-bootlegs (Sw.); Australienprojekt (Ge.)), the frequencies of such compounds also appear to be on the increase (for German, see Zifonun 2010 and for Swedish Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013). It is noteworthy that Zifonun (2010) attributes this change in German to English influence.

Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects (see, e.g., Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013; Schlücker 2013: 464–5; Breban 2017: 13), there has to date been no systematic study. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by investigating the semantic categories personal names, place names and names of organizations used as premodifiers in both English source texts and English target texts translated from German and Swedish. The investigation shows (i) what structural means are used in German and Swedish to render the modifiers, (ii) in what ways the semantic categories of the proper nouns affect the translation choices, (iii) what German and Swedish structures are translated as English proper noun modifiers and (iv) the specific nature of translated language (cf. Baker 1993).

The corpus used in this study, the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish Corpus (LEGS) (see, Ström Herold & Levin Forthcoming), consists of recently published (2000s) popular non-fiction texts (e.g., biographies and popular science) in English, German and Swedish, and is balanced for the three languages, each original always being accompanied by two target texts. Also, each author and translator is represented only once. The corpus, which is being compiled by the present authors, currently comprises about 250,000 words in each source language with translations. The main advantage of the corpus is that there are always two translations available for every source-text segment. This makes it possible to compare how the very same instance has been translated into two target languages, thereby allowing identification of language-specific and translation-specific features. Moreover, the corpus provides translations from two source languages into each language. A tagged version of the corpus was searched for proper nouns immediately followed by (a) common noun(s). This way, more than 1,000 instances of English proper noun modifiers and 1,600 German and Swedish correspondences were retrieved.

The results show that there are many different alternatives among the renderings of proper noun modifiers, the three most frequent being compound nouns (the Norway fiasco > das Norwegen-Fiasko (Ge.)), prepositional phrases (the Apple corridors > korridorerna på Apple (Sw.)) and genitives (U.N. climate summits > FN:s klimattoppmöten (Sw.)). Apart from these, ten minor correspondence categories were identified.

Among the notable language-specific tendencies is a significantly stronger German preference for compounds (the Stanford campus > den Stanford-Campus) (cf. Carlsson’s (2004) finding on compounds being more common in German than in Swedish). Swedish translations instead use more postmodifying prepositional phrases (the Fukushima disaster > katastrofen i Fukushima [‘the disaster in Fukushima’]). However, compounds are strongly disfavoured in both German and Swedish translations when the noun phrase contains a “heavy head” (cf. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013), i.e. a head consisting of a ‘compound’/ two or more nouns. Such noun phrases are instead often translated into (compound nouns followed by) prepositional phrases containing the proper nouns, e.g. a Yale law degree > einen Juraabschluss in Yale (Ge.); juristexamen vid Yale (Sw.) [‘a law-degree at Yale’].

Concerning the semantic categories of proper noun, the ones based on organizations are typically translated into compounds (every Apple product > jedes Apple-Produkt (Ge.)) or genitives (Red Army soldiers > Röda arméns soldater (Sw.)). In contrast, proper noun modifiers based on place names are more often rendered as prepositional phrases (Ontario residents > die Bürger von Ontario (Ge.); invånarna i Ontario (Sw.)), as already noted by Schlücker (2013) for German.

Overall, acronyms are quite frequent as premodifiers (NKVD troops) in both English source texts and translations, and they have a bearing on translation choices. While German prefers compounds (a US news show > einer US-Nachrichtensendung), Swedish prefers genitives (U.S. negotiators > USA:s förhandlare).

Most of the proper noun modifiers in English target texts translated from German and Swedish are based on compounds (e.g., DDR-Fernsehen (Ge.) > GDR television). Postmodifying prepositional phrases are very rarely translated into premodifiers (ett hotell i Florida (Sw.) > a Florida hotel), as also found by Levin & Ström Herold (2017), and the same holds true for genitives. It is noteworthy that some English modifiers originate in the translation strategy explicitation (skärgården [‘the archipelago’] (Sw.) > the Stockholm archipelago).

The results indicate that premodifiers (such as proper noun modifiers) are rarer in translations than in source texts, possibly because they are less explicit and/or more compressed, as suggested by Levin & Ström Herold (2017). Another translation-specific feature concerns proper noun modifiers being dispreferred with unknown/exotic elements, as when the Swedish compound Expressenjournalisten is translated into a postmodifying prepositional phrase in English a journalist on Expressen newspaper, in spite of similar constructions often being written as premodifiers in English source texts (e.g., the Time reporter).

References

Baker, M. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies: implications and applications. In M. Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.) Text and Technology: in Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 233–250.

Biber, D., Grieve, J. & Iberri-Shea, G. (2009). Noun phrase modification. In G. Rohdenburg & Julia Schlüter (eds.) One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 182–193.

Breban, T. (2017). Proper names used as modifiers: a comprehensive functional analysis. English Language and Linguistics, 1–21.

Carlsson, M. (2004). Deutsch und Schwedisch im Kontrast: Zur Distribution nominaler und verbaler Ausdrucksweise in Zeitungstexten. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.

Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (2013). A Mozart sonata and the Palme murder: The structure and uses of proper-name compounds in Swedish. In K. Börjars, D. Denison & A. Scott (eds.) Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 253–290.

Leech, G., Hundt, M. Mair, C. & Smith, N. (2009). Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levin, M & Ström Herold, J. (2017). Premodification in translation English hyphenated premodifiers in fiction and their translations into German and Swedish. In T Egan & H. Dirdal (eds.) Cross-linguistic Correspondences: From Lexis to Genre. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins,  149–176.

Rosenbach, A. (2007). Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English. English Language and Linguistics 11(1), 143–189.

Schlücker, B. (2013). Non-classifying compounds in German. Folia Linguistica 47, 449–480.

Ström Herold, J. & Levin, M. (Forthcoming). English ing-clauses and their German and Swedish correspondences.

Zifonun, G. (2010). Von Bush administration zu Kohl-Regierung: Englische Einflüsse auf deutsche Nominalkonstruktionen? In C. Scherer & A. Holler (eds.) Strategien der Integration und Isolation nicht-nativer Einheiten und Strukturen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 165–182.

In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and the same holds true also in linguistics. The rapidly increasing size of corpora, the emergence of dynamic real-time streams, and the availability of complex and enriched metadata have made it increasingly important to facilitate new and innovative approaches to presenting and exploring primary data. This demonstration showcases the uses of Virtual Reality (VR) in the visualization of geospatial linguistic data using data from the Nordic Tweet Stream (NTS) project (see Laitinen et al 2017). The NTS data for this demonstration comprises a full year of geotagged tweets (12,443,696 tweets from 273,648 user accounts) posted within the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). The dataset includes over 50 metadata parameters in addition to the tweets themselves.

We demonstrate the potential of using VR to efficiently find meaningful patterns in vast streams of data. The VR environment allows an easy overview of any of the features (textual or metadata) in a text corpus. Our focus will be on the language identification data, which provides a previously unexplored perspective into the use of English and other non-indigenous languages in the Nordic countries alongside the native languages of the region.

Our VR prototype utilizes the HTC Vive headset for a room-scale VR scenario, and it is being developed using the Unity3D game development engine. Each node in the VR space is displayed as a stacked cuboid, the equivalent of a bar chart in a three-dimensional space, summarizing all tweets at one geographic location for a given point in time (see: https://tinyurl.com/nts-vr). Each stacked cuboid represents information of the three most frequently used languages, appropriately color coded, enabling the user to get an overview of the language distribution at each location. The VR prototype further encourages users to move between different locations and inspect points of interest in more detail (overall location-related information, a detailed list of all languages detected, the most frequently used hashtags). An underlying map outlines country borders and facilitates orientation. In addition to spatial movement through the Nordic areas, the VR system provides an interface to explore the Twitter data based on time (days, weeks, months, or time of predefined special events), which enables users to explore data over time (see: https://tinyurl.com/nts-vr-time).

In addition to demonstrating how the VR methods aid data visualization and exploration, we will also briefly discuss the pedagogical implications of using VR to showcase linguistic diversity.

The present study concerns English hyphenated premodifiers translated into German and Swedish. The material was collected from the fiction part of the English – Swedish Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, and includes almost 700 instances of translations into both German and Swedish, as well as 500 instances each of translations from German and Swedish into English. In the material, hyphenated premodifiers come in many different forms. However, they are mostly short, often containing nominal heads (head-office (man)), ed-participles (water-filled (ditches)) or adjectives (gray-green (tweed)), and only a few are longer, creative hapaxes ((her) “take-me-seriously-or-I’ll-sue-you”(demeanor)). The translations into English contain less variation than English originals, as predicted by translation theory. When the premodifiers are translated into German and Swedish they are often restructured, and only half are translated into German and Swedish premodifiers. German and Swedish premodifying compound adjectives/participles are the most frequent equivalents of English hyphenated premodifiers. More complex English premodifiers are often rendered as postmodifiers in German and Swedish. As could be expected from the preferred noun-phrase structures in German and Swedish, German translations have a (slightly) stronger preference for premodification (e.g., the all-embracing unit → die alles umschließende Einheit), while Swedish (slightly) more often uses postmodifying clauses and prepositional phrases (fifteen-year-old schoolgirls → skolflickor i femtonårsåldern). German and Swedish postmodifiers are very rarely translated into English hyphenated premodifiers.

This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in sociolinguistics. This model predicts that mobile individuals with ties outside a home community and subsequent loose-knit networks tend to promote the diffusion of linguistic innovations. The model has been applied to a range of small ethnographic networks. We use a database of nearly 200,000 informants who send micro-blog messages in Twitter. We operationalize networks using two ratio variables; one of them is a truly weak tie and the other one a slightly stronger one. The results show that there is a straightforward increase of innovative behavior in the truly weak tie network, but the data indicate that innovations also spread under conditions of stronger networks, given that the network size is large enough. On the methodological level, our approach opens up new horizons in using big and often freely available data in sociolinguistics, both past and present.