Describing lexical patterns in simultaneously interpreted discourse in a parallel aligned corpus of Russian-English interpreting (SIREN)

Abstract

The paper introduces a corpus of simultaneous interpretation, SIREN. SIREN is a parallel aligned bidirectional corpus of original and simultaneously interpreted speech in Russian and English. At the moment the corpus contains 235,040 words and is enriched with POS and shallow syntactic annotation. After outlining the corpus design, I used scores for lexical variety, density and POS proportionalities to make tentative claims about the linguistic variation between originals and interpretations. Low lexical variety and density are taken as indicators of simplification, while a higher ratio of nominal to pronominal reference is seen as an indicator of explicitation. Atypical wordclass distribution indicates the source language shining through. Somewhat contradictory results, with the Russian subcorpus conforming to the predictions of translation theory and the English subcorpus exhibiting the opposite trend in all universals but still shining through, invites further investigation of the data and once again puts into question unequivocal claims about T-universals.