What is kept and what is lost without translation? A corpus-assisted discourse study of the European Parliament’s original and translated English

Abstract

In July 2011, the European Parliament (EP) stopped providing a written translation of its proceedings. Some years later, it seems apposite to look back and ask: What is kept and what is lost without the EP translating? To answer this question, the present paper adopts the first (modern diachronic) corpus-assisted discourse analysis study (MD-CADS) carried out within translation studies by drawing on the discourse-historical approach (DHA) and corpus linguistics (CL) tools. Hence, along DHA lines, the paper proceeds from texture through strategies to content by focusing on CL key keywords and detailed consistency. It performs analysis upon the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus archive, compiled at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). This study shows that MD-CADS is a potential source of data for triangulation with other, more qualitative, approaches.