Obituários na tradução : um estudo baseado em corpus

Sooner or later death will affect everyone, everywhere. However, this harsh reality is faced differently across cultures. Obituaries can help unveil some of those differences and their impact on translation (Loock & Lefebvre-Scodeller, 2014). Using corpus linguistics as methodology (Baker, 1993; Laviosa, 2002; McEnery & Hardie, 2012; Philip, 2009; Zanettin, 2012), we aim to investigate if – and to what extent – a comparable American English-Brazilian Portuguese corpus of obituaries can help with the task of raising students’ awareness of cultural peculiarities encountered in the same genre written in different languages and their consequences for equivalence retrieval. In order to accomplish our task, we selected texts published in Brazilian and U.S.A. newspapers in 2015 and 2017. Despite addressing an everyday subject, obituaries are little explored academically. Nevertheless, this neglect is not proportional across countries, but it results from the popularity enjoyed by the genre. While obituaries are widely read in the United States, in Brazil they are rare, almost solely dedicated to famous deceased. Qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that terminology lacks in Portuguese due to cultural differences regarding the theme and that the lack of contact with the genre, in addition to ritual differences encountered in both countries/cultures, can help explain difficulties faced by Brazilian undergraduate students of Translation to render U.S.A. obituaries into Portuguese

Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E, 2014

The aim of this article is to compare the use of referring expressions to the deceased in obituaries written in English and in French, with an aim to define implications for translation. While both grammatical systems provide speakers with similar expressions (First Name + Family Name, Family Name, Title + Name, First Name, Nickname, Lexical Descriptions with or without Names, Pronominal Forms), these do not show the same distribution and frequency. Through the study of Necrocorpus, a corpus of recent obituaries written in English and French, inter-language differences are uncovered and used for a discussion on the utilization of inter-language differences for translation training and quality assessment.

Perspectives in pragmatics, psychology & philosophy, 2017

Death notices as typically found in newspapers depict a conventionalized use of language which reflects the cultural norms attached to announcing someone's death and saying goodbye. Frequently, the event of death or dying is not explicitly referred to in obituaries, but rather circumscribed by the use of euphemistic expressions. Drawing on previous studies on the use of euphemisms in relation to the event of death (e.g., Crespo Fernández 2006; Haddad 2009; Rabab'ah and Al-Qarni 2012) we propose an understanding of euphemism as "pragmeme", representing "instantiated" (Capone 2010; Capone and Mey 2016; Mey 2 0 0 7 , 2010) communicative strategies which can be characterized as genre-, language-, and culture-specific. By drawing on 80 death notices in the English language from The New York Times and 80 obituaries from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in the German language, respectively, the study presents a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of different instantiations of euphemisms (e.g., 'metaphor of departure', 'metaphor of sleep', or 'orthophemism'). The encountered euphemisms have distinguished characteristics, thus providing evidence of the different extent to which socio-cultural norms are encoded through euphemistic references.

2018

The obituary pages, it turns out, are some of the best-read pages in the newspaper […] the emotion is there, the tension, the entertainment, the tragedy, and the comic relief," says an eminent American obituarist, Marilyn Johnson (2006: 7). In recent years, the obituary has enjoyed a remarkable revival in literary prestige and popularity with American and British newspaper readers. Thus, in the English-speaking world, hardly does a broadsheet appear without an obituary section or page. Furthermore, the modern obituary is no longer a templated death notice, which informs about the deceased, death circumstances, funeral or commemorative services, and lists the predeceased and survivors. On the contrary, obituary readers can find not only bare facts from the life of a person who, for some reason, obituarists have chosen to be commemorated but also a rich variety of stories, comments, quotations, anecdotes and even jokes. By applying a skillful combination of all tricks of the trade, they attempt at judging and evaluating the person, his/her life and achievements. This evaluative character of the contemporary obituary has not been researched in-depth by contemporary linguistics, and in particular, by cognitive linguistic theory, axiological semantics and the theory of speech genres. Therefore, the research into contemporary British obituaries done by Tomasz Włodarski and presented in Evaluative Insights into Lives: Towards a Cognitive and Axiological Analysis of Obituaries provides a valuable insight into the phenomenon of media discourse. The monograph is based on the Author's PhD dissertation (Kompozycyjne, tematyczne, stylistyczne i aksjologiczne cechy angielskiego gatunku 'Obituary'. Studium opierające się na analizie wybranej ogólnokrajowej prasy brytyjskiej),

Language lives on voices, but also on silence. Words can be a mask with which speakers and listeners partially hide the face of truth. This complicit muteness is the ritual conventionally followed in reference to sensitive or delicate experiences, given the emotional impact they have on those who speak or hear about them (Abrantes 2001). Fear of death evokes the same emotions for words related to it and comes as a result of people associating symbols with the things they symbolize. Our study seeks to identify the euphemistic resources used to refer to death in the obituaries of the Notícias Newspaper. For the materialization of this study, 224 obituaries from the Notícias Newspaper were collected. The collected data was analyzed in the light of the qualitative approach, more specifically under the descriptive-explanatory prism. We concluded that the speakers protect and maintain their positive face using metaphors, metonymies and synonyms. However, there is a tendency of euphemizing death with metaphoric expressions licensed by conceptual metaphors of religious origin. .

Res Militaries, 2022

This paper uses a 150,000-word English-Arabic parallel corpus of the autobiography of Anita Moorjani's Dying to Be Me (2012) to examine how culture-bound expressions such as death and happiness were translated from English into Arabic in the strongly intimate autobiography novel under examination. To do so, the corpus linguistic analysis tool SketchEngine has been used. Comparing the size of the English text with its Arabic counterpart using the wordlist tool of SkerchEngine, the researcher found that the number of words (types) in the Arabic translation is similar to that of the English source text. The researcher carried out a keyword analysis and compared the English and Arabic texts to identify the terms for death and life saliently used in the text. Using the parallel concordance tool and comparing the English text with its Arabic translation showed that the translators mainly resorted to the following techniques of oblique translation as follows: Domestication (73.5%) and foreignization (26.5%). Transposition and modulation were the techniques maximally used in the domestication strategies whereas literal translation and borrowing were the most used techniques in the foreignization strategies. Accordingly, domestication strategies prevailed among the translation of this novel. The study recommends further investigations to be conducted using the same approach but on larger corpora of other genres, such as biographies, young literature, and science fiction.

Journal of Contrastive Pragmatics, 2024

Mourning in online spaces has become an integral part of digitally mediated social practices in post-digital society. While the loss of loved ones, public figures, or victims of large-scale tragedies is increasingly mourned online, research on social media mourning remains limited, particularly in contrastive pragmatics. This study examines condolence posts in English and Spanish from a contrastive pragmatic perspective, addressing gaps in both speech act research and the study of emotions in online mourning. Prior contrastive studies have primarily analyzed condolences through discourse completion tests, which present methodological limitations. Additionally, while research on mourning highlights the role of emotions in condolence expressions, contrastive pragmatic studies of emotion remain scarce. This study contributes to the field by analyzing non-elicited online condolence discourse, exploring both its pragmalinguistic realization and emotional expressions. Through the compilation and analysis of two corpora of condolence posts containing relevant hashtags in English and Spanish from X (formerly Twitter), this research provides new insights into the discursive strategies of online mourning across languages.

Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper aims at exploring socio-cultural stance and perspective in writing practices for condolence emails. The social purpose of condolence emails is to express deep sadness on the passing souls. Therefore, such texts note life stories and commemorate inspirations of the deceased both famous and infamous so account for the genre analysis (Christie & Martin, 1997). Since personal emails are written by the individuals concerned so necessarily outline significant cultural elements. The study builds on the topological genre analysis (James R Martin & Rose, 2008) of the condolence emails mainly looking into staging (sequential and ascriptional) and describing linguistic features (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). The analysis shows significant socio-cultural variations in writing condolence emails. Therefore, genre features of the selected texts reveal that differences in perspectives and stance in constructing such texts are mainly attributes of the socio-cultural distinction’s peculia...

From the use of corpora with lexicographical purposes arise many problems that hinder the work of lexicographer and interfere with the development of dictionaries. Among the main problems we have in this use of corpora it has to be highlighted the absence of lemmas and the possible loss and reduction of polysemes or variants of meaning. The criterion of representativeness of a corpus is compromised. All corpora, in spite of their broadness, are no more than a limited group of texts that may not contain all the lexical richness of a language.

Portuguese Studies, 2012

Up the 1970s and 1980s, Portuguese society, most notably in rural areas, did not conceal from the young the realities of ageing and the death of loved ones. Today these are effectively prohibited topics, and many children therefore grow up without any knowledge of death. But this shortcoming in the education of the young can in part be overcome by reading literary works such as those analysed in this article. Drawing on a wide range of stories and verses, both creative retellings of traditional tales and more markedly original writings, we see how modern Portuguese authors such as António Mota and Álvaro Magalhães are able to discuss death in a way that is accessible, and helpful, to children. Até sensivelmente às décadas de 70 ou 80 do século passado, a sociedade portuguesa, sobretudo a mais rural, não escondia dos mais novos as doenças, o envelhecimento e a morte dos entes queridos. Hoje estes são temas praticamente proibidos e por isso muitas crianças são educadas sem o conhecimento da morte. Mas esta carência pode ser em parte suprida através da leitura de obras literárias como as que analisamos neste artigo. Baseando-nos numa grande variedade de histórias e versos, quer adaptações muito criativas de histórias tradicionais quer contos e romances especificamente de autor, vemos como escritores portugueses modernos como António Mota e Álvaro Magalhães são capazes de falar sobre a morte de uma forma que é acessível e útil às crianças.