A corpus-based study of semantic differences in translation: The case of inchoativity in Dutch

This paper presents a corpus-driven, statistical method for the visualization of semantic structure, thereby tackling the under-researched issue of semantics in corpus-based Translation Studies. We aim to investigate the influence of translation on the structure of semantic fields and in particular the extent to which the structure of the semantic field of inchoativity differs between original, non-translated Dutch and translated Dutch. The visualizations of the semantic field of inchoativity show that translated Dutch indeed differs from non-translated Dutch on the semantic level. Based on the exploration of the semantic fields, we furthermore formulate some hypotheses concerning the presence of the so-called universal tendencies of translation on the semantic level.

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