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Humanities and the arts
- Corpus linguistics
- Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
- Translation studies
- Interpreting studies
This proposal aims to investigate the role of structural priming in translation. This cognitive mechanism has received only little attention in Empirical Translation Studies compared to the field of psycholinguistics. Specifically, this study addresses two main research questions: (i) the influence of linguistic context on structural priming, and (ii) the differences in priming effects based on language similarity between the source and target languages. The research employs a multi-method approach, combining a corpus-based study and an experiment. In both, voice-alternation is used as a test-case to assess the effects of priming and 5 different languages are considered (Dutch, English, German, Italian, and Spanish). On the one hand, the corpus study analyses passive and passivizable active constructions in the multilingual parallel corpus Intercop. On the other hand, the experiment involves various tests where translation students and bilinguals translate the same active and passive constructions in a single-sentence condition vs. a full-text condition. The experimental stimuli are presented to 4 groups of participants, each translating into Dutch from a different source language (English, Italian, German, or Spanish). The combination of both a product and a process study will allow us to provide a comprehensive understanding of structural priming.