The effect of standardisation and cross-linguistic influence on the position of time adverbials in English-to-Dutch subtitle translation: A corpus-based study

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of standardisation and cross-linguistic influence on the English-to-Dutch translation of time adverbials (TAs) in subtitles. The study was carried out by means of a corpus-based method, in which the positional change in the translation of the TAs ago, yesterday, and tomorrow was determined by comparing the position in the English source texts to the position in the Dutch target texts. For this, a sample from the OpenSubtitles2018 parallel corpus was used. The hypothesis was that standardisation would exert the strongest influence on the placement on TAs in Dutch target texts, but that the effects of cross-linguistic influence would be evident, too. The most prominent positional change is final position in the English source text to medial position in the Dutch target text. This reflects the conventions of Dutch usage, and thus provides support for the hypothesis that standardisation has the strongest influence on TA positionality in English-to-Dutch translation of subtitles. When individual TAs are considered, however, potential cross-linguistic influence effects are also evident.