1. RESEARCH QUESTIONS TAKEN UP AND METHODOLOGIES DEPLOYED IN ZANETTIN, BAKER
AND KLONOWITCZ
Zanettin’s major research questions are; to what extent are corpus design and corpus encoding
influential on our findings based on corpora? what does a researcher needs to do with corpus design
and corpus encoding in order to come up with a research which is more suitable for standardization,
researchers’ exchange of corpora as well as the findings based on such corpora? Defining several
types of what he named as “translation-driven corpus” (105) he proposed that what he mainly deals
with in his article is “bi-directional parallel corpus”, which entails in itself both “bilingual comparable
corpus” as well as “monolingual comparable corpus”. Zanettin acknowledges the theoretical
challenges of “bi-directional parallel corpus” but claims that a close examination of such pitfalls
provides a “means of improving the design of the different kinds of translation-driven corpora”.
“Representativeness”, “diversification” and “corpus encoding” are referred to as the main issues to
be considered so as to overcome such pitfalls. Zanettin gives space to a quantitative analysis
involving type/token ratio for a corpus comprising 5 novels and a short story by Salman Rushdie. A
comparison of the translations with their respective source texts suggest that “the vocabulary used
in the translations is more varied than that of the source texts” (110). However, predicting that this
conclusion could be due to “structural differences” (111), Zanettin requires to compare the both
texts to “reference corpora” for English and Italian. However, this comparison points to a different
conclusion: This time (after also using Standard deviation), Zanettin reaches the conclusion that
translations are “less varied than the source texts”. After seeing these different outcomes, Zanettin
proposes that parallel corpora need to be used together with other corpus resources, e.g. reference
corpus for this case. Zanettin also underlines some “losses” taking place while transforming printed
texts into the electronic format. The most importantly, paratextual and visual information is mostly
erased during the transformation, Zanettin argues. Besides, he mentions the necessity of “tagging”
and “parsing” in order to add both textual as well as extra-textual information to the electronic
versions of the texts to eliminate the “losses” resulted from the transformation process.
In her article “Narratives of Terrorism and Security: ‘Accurate’ Translations, Suspicious
Frames”, Mona Baker contextualizes the “subtle” devices used to portrait Arabs and Muslims
synonymous with extremism, terrorism and anti-semitism. Drawing on “Narrative Theory” and
describing its several types as “personal”, “public”, “disciplinary” and “meta”, Baker depicts pro-
Israeli neo-conservatist MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) as an institution making use
of these types and resorting to the all aspects of narrative construction as “selective appropriation”,
“causal emplotment”, “temporality” and “relationality”. Focusing mainly on “narrative” and
“framing” in her article, Baker often refers to the website of MEMRI and its discourse. The number of
source languages MEMRI generates news and the target languages MEMRI benefits to inform its
reader are significant indicators of the main aspects of MEMRI’s narrative in Baker’s research.
Besides, She focuses on the categories on the organization’s website, the nature of the captions,
headings in relation to the body of the news, video links, paralinguistic devices and investigate how
all these contribute to the larger public narrative elaborated through translations from selected
sources from Arab or non-Arab press and media.