A Model for Translation Study Based On English-Indonesian Translation Database and Its Pedagogical Implication

Research Team

Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg, PhD (Principal Investigator)

Prof. Dr. I Made Rajeg (Co-Principal Investigator)

I Gede Semara Dharma Putra (Student Member)

Putu Dea Indah Kartini (Student Member)

Research Scheme

Departmental Research Excellence

English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University

Summary

Linguistics in the 21st century entered what is known as the quantitative turn. This turn is triggered by, among others, the technological advances that include the increasing availability of large collection of computerised texts (i.e. language corpora) and of advanced, open-source statistical software for doing data science. One kind of the available corpora is bilingual, parallel corpora, which contains a collection of sentences from a source language (e.g. English) and their correspondence/equivalence in a target language (e.g. Indonesian). Our project offers a model of research in translation studies on the basis of a 9-million-sentence of English-Indonesian parallel corpus from the Open Subtitles Corpus, adopting several techniques in corpus linguistics. As a case study, we analyse the Indonesian translation of near-synonymous verbs in English, namely rob and steal (hereafter, R&S). We focus on R&S because previous works in English and few other European languages show that R&S exhibit distinct constructional realisation regarding which participants are profiled (i.e. selected as core arguments), despite R&S's similar conceptual content/semantics. The analytical aspects in our study will include (i) variation and quantitative distribution of Indonesian equivalences of R&S, and (ii) degree of constructional equivalence of R&S when translated into Indonesian. The expected implications of this project will be the application of corpus data and method in the study and learning of translation in our department, and the impetus for corpus-based, verb-translation database that contains constructional-profile and quantitative information.

Our research topic follows one of our departmental research roadmaps, namely "Utilisation of information technology in enhancing English language learning", which, in 2021, focuses on the sub-theme of "Developing a model for learning translation for the English Department students".

News

• 2022-10-01 - We have published the final report (in Indonesian) on the Open Science Framework.

• 2022-05-26 - Another paper from this project is accepted for publication (as per 11 November 2022, it is published open access) in PAROLE: Journal of Linguistics and Education (titled: A corpus linguistic study of constructional equivalence for the Indonesian translation of ROB and STEAL based on the OpenSubtitles Parallel Corpus).

• 2022-01-22 - We presented a paper in LITERATES 2022 on the contrastive study of constructional profiles of the Indonesian equivalence of ROB and STEAL based on parallel (English-Indonesian) and monolingual Indonesian corpora.
  

• 2021-12-11 - Release of the paracorp R package (v0.0.1) (Rajeg 2021) used to generate the parallel concordance (cf. the README page or the webpage of the package for some usage demos).

• 2021-11-25 - Presentation at the Seminar Nasional Sains dan Teknologi (SENASTEK) 2021.

• 2021-10-19 - Abstract submission for Seminar Nasional Sains dan Teknologi (SENASTEK) 2021 is accepted. We are going to present a sub-set of the whole project at that seminar.

• 2021-07-26 - A four-day elementary data analysis workshop with MS Excel and R (for the student members). Check out the materials on GitHub or Zenodo (DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5131785)

• 2021-02-19 - Presentation at Seminar Nasional Bahasa Ibu (SNBI) 2021 (cf. the recording below [in Indonesian])

• 2021-02-06 - Abstract submission for Seminar Nasional Bahasa Ibu (SNBI) 2021

• 2021-01-26 - Research Proposal Presentation (cf. the recording below [in Indonesian])