Translation Awareness of Sense Shifts of Coveying Discourse Relations Based on English TED Talks and Their Translation into Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish

Abstract

This study aims at raising translator awareness by highlighting the boundaries and scope of sense shift variation of discourse relations while translating two English TED talk transcripts and their Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish translations. We used a coherence-based approach and quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the overall distribution of relation types across the data for each language set. The study then focused on the differences in sense shifts in translation in the TLs (target languages). Sense shifts mostly occurred while rendering English implicit relations as TL implicit relations. The study claims that despite some common features among TLs, several differences also occur, which might give ground to an understanding of means of transmitting discourse relations in the languages that were analyzed.