Translation and Language Change with Reference to Popular Science Articles: The interplay of Diachronic and Synchronic Corpus-Based Studies

Although a number of scholars have adopted a corpus-based approach to the investigation of translation as a form of language contact and its impact on the target language (Steiner, 2008; House, 2004; 2008; Baumgarten et el. 2004), no sustained corpus-based study of translation involving Modern Greek has so far been attempted and very few diachronic corpus-based studies (Amouzadeh & House, 2010) have been undertaken in the field of translation. This study aims to combine synchronic and diachronic corpus-based approaches, as well as parallel and comparable corpora for the analysis of the linguistic features of translated texts and their impact on non-translated ones. The corpus created captures a twenty-year period (1990-2010) and is divided into three sections, including non-translated and translated Modern Greek popular science articles published in different years, as well as the source texts of the translations. Unlike most studies employing comparable corpora, which focus on revealing recurrent features of translated language independently of the source and target language, this study approaches texts with the intention of revealing features that are dependent on the specific language pair involved in the translation process.