Investigating interference in the translation of recipes by Brazilian students of Spanish as a foreign language

Author(s)

Bruna Macedo de Oliveira

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2013-09-30

Examining board members

Heloísa Pezza Cintrão; José Luiz Vila Real Gonçalves; Mirta María Groppi Asplanato de Varalla

• Advisor: Heloísa Pezza Cintrão

Abstract

This study aims at investigating interference in the translation of recipes carried out by Brazilian students of Spanish as a foreign language, based on an empirical study of a comparable corpus, a parallel corpus, and cognitive data. Understanding interference as the incorporation of elements of a language when producing another (MACKEY, 1970 apud PRESAS, 2000), we believe that using a structure which frequently occurs in the source text, but does not occur frequently in the target language leads to a an undesirable and unnatural result (TAGNIN, 2005), specially in the case of communicative texts, such as is the case of the recipe genre. Based on empirical data, this study aimed at verifying the hypothesis in Presas (2000), according to which it is possible to find in translation a type of interference that, contrariwise to the phenomenon commonly described in language acquisition/earning, acts in the opposite direction, that its, from the foreign language to the mother tongue. According to our initial assumption, certain structures may favor the occurrence of this phenomenon, precisely because they function analogously, but not identically, in both languages involved. To investigate this hypothesis, a corpus was built with translations of recipes into Brazilian Portuguese from Spanish. The translations were carried out by Brazilian students on two different occasions of the Portuguese-Spanish undergraduate course: in the middle of the course (L3) and at the end of the course (TC). For this study we used the corpus to focus on the translation of subordinate time clauses beginning with cuando and hasta, and of finality clauses starting with para. In order to establish the use/selection of certain syntactic constructions as a type of interference in translation, it was essential to verify that the structures found in the translations where not in fact the most frequent in the recipe genre in Brazilian Portuguese. In this respect, we used a corpus specially built to this end made up of recipes originally written in English and Portuguese. It was considered equally important in terms of corpus building that two other tasks, besides translation were included in the corpus, (i) a free writing task, according to which the subjects had to write a recipe in Portuguese based on a sequence of pictures, and (ii) a cloze task, according to which they had to fill in the spaces, which corresponded to the subordinate clauses object of this study, in a recipe in Portuguese. The goal was to identify: 1) which was the most frequent form used in subordinate clauses with cuando/quando, hasta/até, and para/para in recipes in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese; 2) whether Brazilian students would use time clauses and finality clauses to write and complete recipes in Portuguese in the same way they used the structures in their translations; and 3) whether there were differences among the recipes gathered on the internet, recipes originally written in Portuguese, and the recipes written by the students. These three goals were attained with the aid of a specific software: Translog (JAKOBSEN, 1999), which provided part of the data used to investigate the translation process (such as the occurrence or of pauses in the clauses, or lack thereof). The chosen theoretical background was based on the concepts of interference in second language acquisition and in translation, and naturalness, in order to carry out a contrastive study of subordinate time and finality clauses in both languages. The method used was based on some of the principles of Corpus Linguistics, in addition to process studies techniques. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 11/15600-8 - An analysis of interference in translations of the genre "recipe" by Brazilian students of Spanish as a foreign language.
• Grantee: Bruna Macedo de Oliveira
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master