Normalization in Specialized Translation; A Corpus Based Study of Genre Specific Urdu Language Texts

Abstract

This exploratory study has investigated the relevance of the translation universals hypothesis of normalization to the English Urdu language pair genre specific parallel, comparable corpus (USTC). The corpus compiled for this study consisted of three genres i.e legal statutes (LSC), newspaper articles (NSC) and academic prose (ASC). The study has investigated if genre specific specialized translated texts normalize in an Indo Aryan language Urdu. The analytical framework to investigate the translation specific linguistic traits is based on Zanettin(2013) WordSmith 7  has been used to find the distribution of list heads for the purpose of analysis . The analysis has revealed that the translated Urdu component (TUT) in USTC has shown a denormalizing tendency in two sub corpus. Moreover, comparable genre specific non translated language (CUT) and general Urdu language corpus components REF(GEN) also favor the same tendency in all the supcorpora. An adherence to generic conventions, the context of the production and consumption of specialized translated texts, and the content-oriented informative role of the texts have provided sufficient justification for contrary to the hypothesis findings. The study would add to the existing knowledge of translators, post-editors, trainers, contrastive genre analysts, terminology banks, and pedagogy developers in the domain of translation studies and machine translation.