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Научни трудове на Съюза на учените в България-Пловдив Серия A. Обществени науки, изкуство и култура том IV, ISSN 1311-9400 (Print); ISSN 2534-9368 (On-line), 2017, Scientific works of the Union of Scientists in Bulgaria-Plovdiv, seriesA. Public sciences, art and culture, Vol. IV, ISSN 1311-9400 (Print); ISSN 2534-9368 (On-line), 2017.
BULGARIAN TRANSLATIONS OF ENGLISH HEDGES IN ACADEMIC
WRITING Polina Petcova Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv
Abstract
The present paper attempts to approach the problematic area of hedging, more specifically the Bulgarian translations of English hedges in the discourse of academic writing. It focuses on hedging occurrences and explores their Bulgarian counterparts based on data from an English-Bulgarian parallel corpus of over 300 sentence pairs. The purposes of this analysis are to see whether hedging has been preserved and if so, what devices have been used. The analysis is seen as a stepping stone to working out a system to identify hedges and, furthermore, to provide some long overdue research into Bulgarian. Key Words: hedges, hedging, translation of hedges, academic discourse, academic writing.
The present paper attempts to approach the problematic area of hedging which has been a topic of discussion for linguists since as early as the 1960s. For the sake of brevity, here is a simple illustration of the phenomenon.1 A definition for the word parrot in any English dictionary may sound very close to: "A [parrot is a] tropical bird with curved beak and usually brightly coloured feathers. Some can be taught to copy human speech" (Ungerer and Schmid 21). In this dictionary entry "usually" and "some" act as hedges in that they hedge or protect against those cases in which the provided definition is less than perfect, presumably, not all parrots are brightly coloured, nor can all of them be taught to copy human speech.
The research that underlies the present paper has so far shown that hedging has not been discussed at all for the Bulgarian language, nor has it been a topic in Bulgarian linguistics at all. Much of the research has been focused primarily on the English language and significantly disproportionate attention has been paid to Amele, Chinese, Daco-Romanian, Danish, Dutch, Frisian, French, German, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, Spanish (Schröder and Zimmer 252-253). At the same time even through all the controversy linguists strongly believe that hedging is very important for interactional purposes and awareness of the concept can only be beneficial to many in various fields (Markkanen and Schröder 12).
A more detailed overview has dealt with the background of the concept elsewhere (cf. Petcova 2016a, 2016b), but the aim of the present paper is to venture further into the discussion of this otherwise unfamiliar matter for Bulgarian, to work towards establishing adequate ways for hedging analysis, despite the definitional chaos that surrounds the concept and the virtually limitless means for its realisation. This paper hopes to do nothing more than to set the stage for a more in-depth view into a matter that has been the subject of fervid discussion outside of Bulgarian language and linguistics.
D For an overview of the concept cf. Petcova 2016a and 2016b.
The paper focuses on hedging occurrences in academic discourse and explores their Bulgarian counterparts based on data from an English-Bulgarian aligned parallel corpus of over 300 sentence pairs. The linguistic corpus is composed of Noam Chomsky's "Language and the Brain" and its translation into Bulgarian by Iliyana Krapova. The analysis is carried out via the Hedge-O-Matic2 tool. Published in 2016 by Ryan Omizo and Bill Hart-Davidson this app-ticle3, as it is called, tokenises then classifies each sentence in a text as hedge or non-hedge to a degree of certainty. The HoM, the authors claim, has an accuracy rate of 80-84% when it comes to scientific academic writing (Omizo and Hart-Davidson). But they also note that a linguist is capable of noticing nuances that the HoM is simply incapable of analysing. This is why it seems beneficial to use both the HoM as a focusing tool and a linguist's perspective to see whether hedging has been preserved in the respective translation and if so, what devices have been used in Bulgarian to achieve it.
It should be mentioned that the HoM is trained for scientific writing but I would like to argue that even though it is a popular stance that scientific writing - viewed as the scientific output of the 'hard' sciences - has more common ground than may be believed by some with the writing of 'soft' sciences, like the humanities, and this common ground is the academic side of writing. A level of discourse that poses certain demands on writers of hard and soft sciences alike in the representation of new knowledge and its negotiation among academic peers.
The text of Chomsky's paper "Language and the brain" was run through the Hedge-O-Matic. Those sentences that the application did not manage to detect are separate, were manually separated, then run and entered as hedges and non-hedges respectively, together with their new values of probability. These occurrences were not numerous and they in no way speak to any deficiencies of HoM, they were only a dozen and all of them were a consequence of reading the text using specialised software. In the next step the Bulgarian translation was aligned with the sentences of the source text. Due to limitations of space the present paper considers only the sentences marked by HoM as hedges. Furthermore, it singles out only those sentences marked as hedges with a certainty of 90% and over. In order to reach any plausible results the theoretical framework of Omizo and Hart-Davidson has been applied. In their view hedges can be either propositional or interpersonal, where the rhetorical purpose of the propositional is "to [qualify] a claim based on the strength of evidence" (drawing on Prince et al.), e.g. "These results suggest that X is a likely outcome of increased carbon emissions" (Omizo and Hart-Davidson) and the rhetorical purpose of the interpersonal is using indirectness for the sake of politeness, of social acceptance, what seems to me very close to Brown and Levinson's face, so i.e. to save face, e.g. "Kale is disgusting, but I'm really only speaking for myself" (Omizo and Hart-Davidson).
Some of the results so far show that in the majority of sentences in which HoM claims that we can observe hedging the linguistic analysis shows that there is indeed strong evidence of hedging4:
e.g. (1) With less confidence I suspect it may be fair to say that current understanding falls well short of laying the basis for the unification of the sciences of the brain and higher mental faculties, language among them, and that many surprises may lie along the way to what seems a distant goal - which would itself come as no surprise if the classical examples I mentioned are indeed a realistic model. (3)
2
D Heretofore abbreviated to HoM.
3
D Application and article at the same time.
4
D Some instances of hedging have been underlined throughout the provided examples for illustration. 28
(2) At least that is what the words seem to imply; the intentions may be different. (7)
There are instances though where the percentage of hedging is high but a close look informs that one of the sentences is more heavily hedged than the other even though HoM claims otherwise.
(3) The irrelevance to human language is, however, far deeper. (156)
(4) Though I suppose Hauser would deny this, it seems to me that on a close look, his actual conclusions do not differ much from the extreme skepticism of his Harvard colleague, evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, who concludes - forcefully - that the evolution of cognition is simply beyond the reach of contemporary science. (193)
(5) As far as I know, the approach Gallistel recommends is sound; in the special case of language, it seems to me to be adopted by all substantive inquiry, at least tacitly, even when that is heatedly denied. (240)
Example (3) is given a 98% probability of containing hedging which seems counterintuitive, especially compared to (4) or (5) which the HoM gives only 91%. This discrepancy certainly warrants further exploration but no satisfactory answer can be provided at this time since one cannot be sure of how the HoM has been programmed, these details are simply not available to HoM users.
From the results in the table below it is evident that out of the 59 analysed sentences, predominant in the corpus are the propositional hedges or 63%, followed by the interpersonal -49%. The least frequent are the cases where both occur together in the scope of the same sentence - 22%.
sentences percent
total number of sentences 59 -
propositional hedges 37 63%
interpersonal hedges 29 49%
both 13 22%
The next step of the analysis focuses on the translation of some of the hedging devices and their function. For illustration let us briefly discuss one of the most frequent hedges throughout the corpus, namely the verb 'seem'. It occurs 25 times or in nearly half the hedged sentences with a probability of 90% and over. It appears in two general forms '[seem] + adjective/ noun' or '[seem] + to me'. It modifies the following statement and in a way softens the blow of some statements that might seem forceful (cf. examples (2), (4) and (5)). I would like to argue that 'seems to me' acts as an interpersonal hedge in its second form '[seem] + to me' since the speaker overtly underlines that it is their own belief and thus seeks not to impose their opinion on the reader. Less often both have been compensated in different ways and there is no overt form in which they are expressed, moreover, their meaning is subsumed in the compensating phrase. The following convincing patterns of translation emerge:
• '[seem] + adjective/ noun' is predominantly translated as 'изглежда' in 63% of all occurrences;
• '[seem] + to me' demonstrates a slightly less strict pattern than the former and appears in Bulgarian most often as 'струва ми се' 44% of occurrences, but also as 'смятам', 'считам', 'според мен'.
As the present paper discusses research in progress, the briefly outlined current results should be
seen as a stepping stone to working out a system for the identification of hedges and their analysis,
presenting no ready-made solutions but attempting to introduce the concept of hedging into
Bulgarian and raise the awareness of communicators.
Works cited
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. Politeness: some universals of language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979.
Omizo, Ryan, and Bill Hart-Davidson. "Hedge-O-Matic." Enculturation, 7 July 2017, http://hedgeomatic.cal.msu.edu/hedgeomatic/.
Petcova, Polina. "A Short Overview of the Concept of Hedging in English and Bulgarian."
Current Issues in Contemporary Linguistics: Festschrift dedicated to Prof. D.Sc. Doctor Honoris Causa Stefana Dimitrova, edited by Maxim Stamenov and Ivo Panchev, Prof. Marin Drinov Academic Publishing House, 2016, pp. 205-209.
—. "Hedging in Bulgarian: some hedging occurrences in linguistics research articles." Trees of Knowledge: Roots and routes: Essays in Honour of Michael Grancharov, edited by Snezha Tsoneva-Mathewson, Yana Rowland, and Vitana Kostadinova, Plovdiv University Press, 2016, pp. 152-158.
Prince, Ellen F., Joel Frader and Charles Bosk. "On hedging in physician-physician discourse." in R. J. Di Pietro (ed.), Linguistics and the professions. Proceedings of the second annual Delaware symposium on language studies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 83- 97.
Schröder, Hartmut, and Dagmar Zimmer. "Hedging Research in Pragmatics: A Bibliographical Research Guide to Hedging." Research in Text Theory: Hedging and Discourse: Approaches to the Analysis of a Pragmatic Phenomenon in Academic Texts, edited by Raija Markkanen, and Hartmut Schröder, De Gruyter, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/state/detail.action?docID=913093.
Corpus
Chomsky, Noam. On Nature and Language. Cambridge UP, 2002.
Krapova, Iliyana, translator. Studii za ezika i filosofiyata na uma. by Noam Chomsky, LIK, 2012.
Contact information: p.petcova@uni-plovdiv.net
