Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation

The translation of references specific to a given source culture has long been prominent, and often problematic aspect practice research. In indirect translation, or the already translated material, linguistic cultural differences accumulate, meaning that omission (CRs) culture-specific items (CSIs) might be generally expected outcome. Yet before such hypotheses can tested, research methods are needed account for broad patterns across whole texts, preferably, semantic categories, genres, time periods, languages. A ‘textual’ approach, focused on context in which CRs likely occur, should complement currently dominant ‘cultural’ mainly relies predefined categories intuition selection objects study. This article illustrates corpus research, particularly keyness analysis, aid uncovering recurrent structural textual functions pose difficulties. this regard, it focuses expressions enumeration, lists, indicators identification, voice. Based trilingual (English, French, Italian) corpus-assisted study Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) John Cary’s An Essay State England (1695), accentuates productive complementarity numerical operations context-sensitive readings.