1. Comments on “Building a resource for studying translation shifts” (by Lea Cyrus) Hans C. Boas University of Texas at Austin http://hcb.gmc.utexas.edu

2. Translation Shift Departure from formal correspondence between source and target text, i.e. deviations that have occurred during the translation process (different subtypes).  What are the parallels and differences between “translation processes” (L1  L2) and “paraphrase relations” (L1  L1)?

3. Catford’s (1965) notion of “shift” “One of the problems with Catford’s approach is that it relies heavily on the structuralist notion of system and thus presupposes that is it feasible – or indeed possible – to determine and compare the valeurs of any two given linguistic items. His account remains theoretic and, at least to my knowledge, has never been applied to any actual translations, not even by himself.”

4. Systematic differences between linguistic systems Some shifts occur for stylistic/pragmatic reasons and preferences Other shifts occur systematically because of differences in linguistic systems These systematic differences are predictable

5. Equivalents/discrepancies Aspectual category: English progressive and German counterparts. Indirect and prepositional passives in English have no constructional equivalents in German (This bed has been slept in by Napoleon). Systematic contrastive studies catalogue these differences (Nickel 1972, Rohdenburg 1974, Chesterman 1998)

6. Predicate-Argument Structures Arguments are given short intuitive role names Entity being dramatised: ENT_DRAMATISED How are these argument labels different from FEs in FrameNet?

7. Semantic modification/divergence “Semantic likeness is interpreted somewhat liberally and the tag is assigned only if the semantic difference is significant.” What criteria can we use to measure semantic likeness? Salkie (2002), Teubert (2002) make different proposals for mesasuring semantic likeness.

8. Tools/FuSer Current: predicate-argument structures are annotated manually. Future: there will be a wizard to scan the sentence for predicate candidates or to suggest suitable argument types when the predicate is already included in the database How will the wizard work? Parallels to FrameNet efforts?

9. Translation process etc. Direction of translation may be important: L1  L2, L2  L1 What about reports in different languages that are not the result of a translation? Thomas Schmidt’s KICKTIONARY (soccer texts in different languages reporting on the same games) What can we learn by comparing the different “genres”?