Linguistic interference in translated academic texts: : A case study of Portuguese interference in abstracts translated into English

• Main Author: Galvao, Gabriela
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Växjö universitet, Institutionen för humaniora 2009
• Subjects: lingvistik; linguistics; engelska; portugisiska; english; portuguese; interference; linguistic; translation; översättning; tradução; português; inglês; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik; Language Technology (Computational Linguistics); Språkteknologi (språkvetenskaplig databehandling)
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-5255

AbstractThis study deals with linguistic interference in abstracts of scientific papers translated fromPortuguese into English collected from the online scientific database SciELO. The aim of thisstudy is to analyze linguistic interference phenomena in 50 abstracts from the field ofhumanities, history, social sciences, technology and natural sciences. The types ofinterference discussed are syntactic/grammatical, lexical/semantic and pragmatic interference.This study is mainly qualitative. Therefore, the qualitative method was used, in order to findout what kinds of interference phenomena occur in the abstracts, analyze the possible reasonsfor their occurrence and present some suggestions to avoid the problems discussed. Besides, aquantitative analysis was carried out to interpret the results (figures and percentages) of thestudy. The analysis is aimed at providing some guidance for future translations. This studyconcluded that translations from a Romance language (in this case Portuguese) into aGermanic language (English) tend to be more objective and/or sometimes lose originalmeanings attributed in the source text. Another important finding was that abstracts from thehumanities, history and social sciences present more cases of interference phenomena than theones belonging to technology and natural sciences. These findings imply that many abstractswithin these areas have high probability to be subject to the phenomena discussed and,consequently, have parts of their original meaning lost or misinterpreted in the target texts.Keywords: abstracts, bilingualism, cross-linguistic influence, linguistic interference, linguistictransfer, non-native speakers of English, Portuguese-English interference, source text, targettext, translation. === Study on linguistic interference