Translation Awareness of Conveying Discourse Relations: A Study on English TED Talks and Their Translation into Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish

Abstract

This study is cross-linguistically framed to raise translator awareness by illuminating the limits and extent of variation regarding the organization of discourse relations in two English TED talk transcripts and their translation into Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish. Within a coherence-based approach and using quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study focused on the differences in the organization of explicit versus other relation types in the TLs (target languages) and then the distribution of relations to senses was explored, showing Portuguese diverged from English. Across languages, Condition, Contrast, and Concession were mostly expressed by explicit means, while Conjunction and to a lesser extent, Result might be implicit. Frequency analyses suggested that implicitation of discourse connectives was not frequent in the target languages, but one Portuguese transcript displayed frequent implicitations, raising the possibility that implicitation may be an option taken by some translators.