ArticlePDF Available

Structural effects of English–German language contact in translation on concessive constructions in business articles

Authors:

Abstract and Figures

Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from hypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures, and have attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This paper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of concessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic corpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing studies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce existing findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of manuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated texts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English concessive conjunctions between 1982/83 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic structures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this development is restricted to translated language. In non-translated texts, the use of hypotactic conjunctions has increased. The use of sentence-initial conjunctions, however, does seem to spread in this genre (as was reported for popular science), which may be further evidence for it to be a case of language change through contact in translation.
Content may be subject to copyright.
Open Access
Mario Bisiada*
Structural effects of EnglishGerman
language contact in translation
on concessive constructions
in business articles
DOI 10.1515/text-2016-0007
Abstract: Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from
hypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures,
and have attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This
paper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of
concessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic
corpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing
studies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce
existing findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of
manuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated
texts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English
concessive conjunctions between 1982/83 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic
structures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this
development is restricted to translated language. In non-translated texts, the
use of hypotactic conjunctions has increased. The use of sentence-initial con-
junctions, however, does seem to spread in this genre (as was reported for
popular science), which may be further evidence for it to be a case of language
change through contact in translation.
Keywords: language contact in translation, translation and language change,
corpus-based translation studies, business translation, concessive constructions
1 Introduction
This paper aims to contribute to the study of language change through language
contact in translation by adopting the diachronic corpus research method from
*Corresponding author: Mario Bisiada, Department of Translation and Language Sciences,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, E-mail: mario.bisiada@upf.edu
Text&Talk 2016; 36(2): 133154
© 2016, Mario Bisiada. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
an existing research project on popular science articles (see House 2011b).
Studies in that project found, among other things, a trend towards a replace-
ment of hypotactic concessive structures, which require a verb-final subordinate
clause as in example (1b), by paratactic ones, which coordinate two verb-second
main clauses, as in example (1a) (Becher 2011).
(1) Although strategy had considerable breadth then, it didnt have much
rigor. (HBR 1/08,54)
a. Das Thema Strategie hatte damals zwar eine gewisse Bandbreite, doch es
mangelte an Disziplin. (manuscript 4)
b. Obwohl das Thema Strategie damals umfangreich behandelt wurde,
mangelte es ihm an Stringenz. (HBM 5/08,10)
They also found an increasing use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions
such as aber and doch (Becher et al. 2009). Using their diachronic corpus
method, I investigate in the present paper whether their findings can be repro-
duced in the genre of business articles. The aim is to increase the range of
analysed genres in order to enable us to make more generalizable statements
about trends in German translated and non-translated language, and learn more
about the possibilities and limitations of diachronic corpus studies of language
contact in translation.
The article also seeks to promote the inclusion of translation manuscripts
into corpora, which allows researchers to study the effects of editorial interven-
tion in the translation process as a whole. A case of such editorial intervention is
exemplified in (1) above, where the editor replaced a paratactic structure by a
hypotactic one. As I will argue, the differentiation of language that is the out-
come of the translation act from language that was influenced by agents other
than the translator allows researchers to verify that the results in question really
relate to translated language. Such a differentiation may also provide interesting
insights into what happens to a multilingually created document during the
many steps of its production.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, I review some relevant
literature in the subfield of translation and language change. Section 3 describes
the corpus structure and size, followed by an outline of the method that has
been adopted and the conjunctions to be analysed. The next sections contain the
analyses of hypotaxis and parataxis (Section 4) and of sentence-initial conces-
sive conjunctions (Section 5). Finally, I discuss the implications of this study for
the alleged developments in, firstly, taxis in German, and secondly, sentence-
initial concessive conjunctions as markers of concessive relations in this genre
(Section 6).
134 Mario Bisiada
2 Structural effects of language contact
in translation
A growing academic interest has focussed on the corpus-based study of lan-
guage contact in translation and the effect of the source language on the target
language, especially regarding English as the source language (see, for instance,
Baumgarten 2007, Baumgarten 2008; Fischer 2007; House 2011a, House 2011b;
Kranich 2011; Kranich et al. 2012; Malamatidou 2013). As far as structural effects
of EnglishGerman language contact in translation are concerned, it has been
established that these are more likely found in frequency shifts of existing
structures than in syntactic innovations (Kranich et al. 2011: 37; Kranich 2014:
112). In spite of this, an important caveat is that it cannot be proved beyond
doubt that observed changes in translation corpora have been affected by
language contact in language usersexposure to translations or to English
articles directly (Neumann 2011: 242243).
Studies of language contact in translation usually adopt the view that
structures or patterns that are conventionally used less often in the target
language exhibit an increase in usage frequency (Koller 1998). They may even-
tually even compete with other patterns that exist for this particular commu-
nicative function (Baumgarten and Özçetin 2008).
Some of those studies have reported a cross-linguistic increase in popularity
of coordinated, paratactic structures, at times at the expense of hypotaxis, and
attributed this shift to the status of English as a lingua franca (Musacchio 2005;
Becher 2011; Bennett 2011, Bennett 2013; Hansen-Schirra 2011; Bisiada 2013).
However, despite the absence of structurally marked subordination, English can
often be shown to exhibit a more hierarchical and subordinated structure
characteristic of a hypotactic style than German does (Fischer 2007: 397,
Fischer 2013; Bisiada 2014).
In an analysis of translations of the concessive conjunction although in
popular science articles, Becher (2011: 195) observes that 19 % of them were
hypotactic in 19992002, as opposed to 55 % in 19781982, while paratactic
translations increased in proportional frequency from 27% to 59 % over the
same time span. The comparable non-translated texts are also reported to show
an increase in parataxis, from 48.5 instances per 10,000 words in 19781982 to 70
in 19992002, while hypotaxis does not increase (Becher 2011: 197).
In his interpretation of the results, Becher (2011: 197) argues that, in popular
science, hypotaxis is already a Randerscheinung(marginal phenomenon)in
non-translated language, with parataxis being the preferred construction type.
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 135
He argues that the frequency of hypotaxis in the translations may have assimi-
lated to its frequency in the non-translations through the translatorsconserva-
tive language use (Becher 2011: 198).
In another study using the same corpus of popular science articles, Becher
et al. (2009) investigate the translation of the English sentence-initial concessive
conjunction but into German. They find a lower frequency of sentence-initial
aber and doch (both mean but) compared to but (Becher et al. 2009: 143),
arguing that German has a stricter organization of the sentence in terms of
given and new information than English,so that German prefers to use a
sentence-internal connective in many situations where English would use a
sentence-initial one(Becher et al. 2009: 137). As a second explanation, they
draw on research conducted by House (2006), among others, to argue that
sentence-initial concessive conjunctions are more common in English discourse,
which they consider more interactional, dialogous and addressee-oriented
while German discourse is described as transactional, monologous and con-
tent-oriented(Becher et al. 2009: 138).
Their data show that, over the analysed time span, translations of but into
German using sentence-initial aber and doch have almost doubled, while the
number of freetranslations has decreased by an equivalent amount (Becher
et al. 2009: 144). The non-translations also show a strong increase in frequency
of sentence-initial aber and doch (Becher et al. 2009: 143). They call these
conjunctions sentence-initial show concessions,used to achieve an inter-
actionalstyle, and explain their findings as an adoption of textual
norms introduced by the EnglishGerman translations(Becher et al. 2009:
145146).
3 Corpora and methodology
3.1 The corpus architecture
This study combines a diachronic parallel corpus with a diachronic comparable
corpus of business articles, and also draws on a manuscript corpus, all of which
I have compiled:
Parallel corpus: English originals and their published German translations
Comparable corpus: German non-translations
Manuscript corpus: a parallel corpus as above as well as unedited manu-
scripts of the translations
136 Mario Bisiada
The business genre was chosen because it combines journalistic and scientific
aspects so that the discourse is produced under similar constraints to popular
science articles. The sources for the corpora are the Harvard Business Review,an
American business magazine, and its German edition, the Harvard Business
Manager. In the compilation of the parallel corpus, the translations were sen-
tence-aligned with the source text sentences. For the manuscript corpus, there is
a three-way alignment of source text, manuscript target text and published
target text. The parallel corpus and comparable corpus are divided into two
subcorpora, one containing texts from 1982 to 1983 and the other containing
texts from 2008. The time span of 25 years that separate the two sample periods
allows a reliable replication of previous research, which has drawn on a corpus
whose two sample periods were separated by about 20 years (Becher et al. 2009:
126; Becher 2011: 191).
The sizes of the parallel and comparable corpora are shown in Table 1. All
issues of the German publication consist of two-thirds translations and one-third
non-translations, which means that the size of the comparable corpus will
necessarily be smaller than that of the parallel corpus. However, the comparable
corpus is only used to validate the results found in the analysis of the parallel
corpus. Therefore, its size is of minor importance and is determined by the time
periods that were chosen for this study.
The authors of the articles in the corpus are one-off contributors, so the analysis
draws on more than 100 different language users. The translations were done by
professional freelance translators, small translation businesses, as well as edi-
torial staff. The articles in the 1982/83 subcorpus have been translated by nine
different translators, while the articles in the 2008 subcorpus have been trans-
lated by sixteen individual translators as well as a translation company.
The texts in the manuscript corpus originate from 2006 to 2011 (see Table 2).
They were translated by the translation agency Rheinschrift and submitted to the
publisher of the magazine, where they were then edited. This corpus thus
contains different versions of the same translated texts, before and after editing.
Table 1: Size of the parallel corpus and comparable corpus in words.
/ 
Parallel corpus English source texts , ,
German translations , ,
Comparable corpus German non-translations , ,
Total size , ,
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 137
3.2 Extending the diachronic corpus method
This diachronic corpus study uses a two-step method. In the first step, German
translations of the English articles from 1982/83 are compared with those from
2008 to determine diachronic changes in, firstly, the translation of the conces-
sive conjunctions although, (even) though, while and secondly, sentence-initial
but. The second step of the analysis investigates the comparable corpus to find
out whether the changes observed in the translations also happened in the non-
translated articles. To that end, the German conjunctions that have been identi-
fied in the parallel corpus are analysed in the comparable corpus to see whether
any patterns are developments exclusive to translated text or whether they are
taking place in the language as a whole within this genre.
In addition, an analysis of the manuscript corpus will show whether any
patterns observed in the parallel and comparable corpora are really the product
of the translation stage or whether they are also affected by the editing stage. The
multitude of different phases through which a multilingually produced text goes in
the process of publication (see e. g. Mossop 2014) warrants a differentiated analysis
of the entire process of document production, which will bring about improve-
ments in the ecological validity of experimental settings(Muñoz Martín 2010: 179).
Therefore, the manuscript corpus analysis aims to corroborate the existence
of patterns in translation manuscripts to ensure that any observations can really
be attributed to the language of translation. If the patterns are instead intro-
duced only at the editing stage, that might be evidence to suggest that the
phenomenon must, at least in part, be attributed to editors rather than transla-
tors (for an application of this method to sentence splitting, see Bisiada 2014). In
that case, the driving forces of a particular phenomenon may not lie entirely
within translation as multilingual discourse, but also be partly exerted by
normative linguistic policies applied within a more monolingual framework.
1
Table 2: Size of the manuscript corpus in words.

English source texts ,
German translations (before editing) ,
Published German translations ,
Total size ,
1Though editing is certainly no monolingual activity (the editors of the Harvard Business
Manager say they always consult the source texts), the constraints it applies to the text are
monolingual, based on readability concerns and house styles.
138 Mario Bisiada
3.3 The concessive connectives under analysis
The English concessive conjunctions whose translations are analysed in this
study are although,though,
2
even though and while, as well as but where it occurs
sentence-initially. Following König et al. (1990: 2529), the equivalent German
constructions can be hypotactic, in which case the connective grammatically
marks the subordination of one clause to the other by selecting a verb-final word
order for the clauses they govern. Alternatively, they can be paratactic, which
means that the conjunction coordinates two clauses, each of which has a verb-
second word order. Paratactic connectives can be conjunctions or conjunctive
adverbs, as exemplified in (2).
(2) Although education and training wont hurt, and may even help, their
effect on the supply of leaders is negligible. (HBR 2/77,89)
3
a. Erziehung und Ausbildung können zwar nicht schaden und sogar ganz
nützlich sein,aber ihre Wirkung auf das Angebot von Führern ist unbe-
deutend. (HBM 2/82,72)
b. Erziehung und Ausbildung können zwar nicht schaden und sogar ganz
nützlich sein, ihre Wirkung auf das Angebot von Führern ist aber
unbedeutend.
Example (2a) shows aber used as a conjunction. The conjunction connects the
two clauses, but is not part of either of them. The example also shows the use of
the particle zwar (roughly it is true that), which is commonly added to express
the tight relationship between the clauses.
Example (2b) has been slightly rearranged so that aber is now used as a
conjunctive adverb. Like a conjunction, a conjunctive adverb connects two
clauses semantically, but acts as part of the verb phrase and is thus part of
the syntactic structure instead of being outside of it (Hentschel 2010: 157).
The remaining translation possibilities will be classed as non-tactic clause
connections. They include cases where there is an asyndetic coordination (see
e. g. Fitzgerald 2014) or where the concessive clause has been omitted or turned
into a prepositional phrase (using, for instance, trotz despite).
In addition to the conjunctions reflecting a conjunction in the source text, I
have also looked at conjunctions that were introduced by translators in
2Except where it introduces a verbless concessive clause or serves as a discourse marker rather
than a conjunction (see Barth-Weingarten and Couper-Kuhlen 2002: 353).
3The code assigned to the texts in the corpus is read, for the present example, as Harvard
Business Review, number 2/1977, article beginning on page 89.
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 139
environments where the source text does not have an equivalent hypotactic or
paratactic conjunction. The insertion of connectives is seen as a form of risk-
taking on the part of the translator (Musacchio and Palumbo 2010: 9). This type
of analysis is necessarily speculative because there is no way of knowing
whether the translator consciously decided to supply a hypotactic or paratactic
construction.
I thus discuss only conjunctions that were introduced with a frequency of
more than one instance per hundred thousand words at one of the time periods
under analysis. Introduced instances of aber and wenn auch are not included, as
they can be used in a wide range of functions other than the conjunctive one, so
that the degree of speculation in this analysis would be increased beyond an
acceptable extent.
3.4 Frequency units and the relative frequency ratio
The data in this paper are presented using three values: the absolute frequency
(n), the normalized frequency (f, given in instances per hundred thousand
words) and the proportional frequency, which is the percentage with which a
construction occurs within its group of related constructions.
A range of frequency counts is necessary to adequately observe trends
between the parallel corpus and the comparable corpus. As outlined above,
the analysis of the parallel corpus focuses on the conjunctions that are transla-
tions of four English conjunctions. In the comparable corpus, where there is no
source text, every instance of an item is counted, which complicates the analysis
of multifunctional items, such as aber. Thus, the normalized frequencies will be
different when comparing one corpus with the other. Proportional frequencies
are not subject to this problem, but to ensure comparability between the cor-
pora, it is desirable to draw on both values at all times.
To be able to compare trends between the corpora, it may suffice to focus on
the difference between the normalized frequencies instead of the frequencies
themselves. Because the frequencies are consistent within each corpus, we can
describe the diachronic difference between the corpora by correlating the corre-
sponding data from each of the two sample points (1982/83 and 2008).
To do this, I propose to use the relative frequency ratio as a measurement of
diachronic difference between two sample points in a corpus. The relative
frequency ratio is usually applied in corpus studies to compare word frequencies
between subject-specific and general texts (Edmundson and Wyllys 1961: 227)
and has been described as being mainly useful to find subject-specific colloca-
tions(Manning and Schütze 1999: 176).
140 Mario Bisiada
The prime example of this method is the corpus study by Damerau (1993:
435) who argues that the relative frequency of a term will be higher in a domain
corpus than in a general corpus, and uses the relative frequency ratio to extract
key words from the subject-specific corpora. In terms of the comparison of two
corpora, Damerau (1993: 444445) found that a simple ratio of subject matter
relative frequency to total sample relative frequency is about as good as more
elaborate calculations, and in some instances superior.A diachronic corpus
analysis at two points in time is basically a comparison of the frequency of the
features under analysis at the later stage with the frequency of that same feature
at the earlier stage. Thus, the relative frequency ratio can be applied to show
diachronic developments between corpora in such settings.
The relative frequency (r) of an item (i) is calculated by dividing the absolute
frequency by the corpus size. The relative frequency of an item in the 2008
parallel corpus is then set in relation to that of the same item in the 1982/83
corpus so that the computed value will reflect potential diachronic changes. The
higher the numerator (the relative frequency of a given construction in the 2008
corpus) in relation to the denominator (the relative frequency of a given con-
struction in the 1982/83 corpus), the higher the value. The formula to calculate
the relative frequency ratio is below.
Ri=ri2008
ri1982=3
=
ni2008
N2008
ni1982=3
N1982=3
Thus, a high value means that there is a diachronic increase in relative frequency
as well as in normalized frequency because the latter is basically the relative
frequency multiplied by, for instance, 100,000. Due to the exponential nature of
the graph representing the equation of R, I consider a value as indicating a
decline if it is below 0.5. In order to indicate an increase in frequency, it must be
above 2. A value of 1 means that the frequencies in both corpora are exactly the
same, so the closer a value is to 1, the less change there is in the frequency.
4 Hypotaxis and parataxis in concessive
constructions
4.1 Analysis of the parallel corpus
The conjunctions that were used to translate although, (even) though and while
are shown in Table 3. There is an overall decrease in concessive conjunctions in
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 141
the translations: While in 1982/83, they occurred at a normalized frequency of
51.3, they only occurred at a frequency of 36.6 in 2008. This may mean that
concessive conjunctions are becoming rarer in the source texts in this genre.
Obwohl is the most frequently used translation for concessive conjunctions
and remains so despite its decline in usage frequency. Regarding the remaining
conjunctions, even though there are not many instances in this corpus, it seems
that in the 1982/83 corpus, translators maintained a diversity of means to
express concessive relationships (wenn auch, selbst wenn, auch wenn), whereas
the genre convention now seems to be the intensifier-conjunction combination
auch wenn.
The conjunction aber occurs more frequently now than it used to (3.6 in
1982/83 compared to 4.6 in 2008); but as a conjunctive adverb, it occurs less
frequently (6.8 down to 3.1). An overall increase is exhibited by doch, which was
hardly used at all in 1982/83 and has increased significantly over the analysed
time span, especially in its function as a conjunction.
Thus, there is a strong decrease in the frequency of hypotactic conjunctions
(Table 4). Their normalized frequency has halved (32.4 to 15.8), and in relative
terms they are now only used in 43 % instead of 63 % of cases. Conjunctive
Table 3: German translations of English concessive conjunctions: normalized fre-
quencies (f).
/ 
Hypotaxis obwohl ..
wenn auch ..
auch wenn ..
selbst wenn ..
obgleich ..
wenngleich ..
obschon ..
während ..
Parataxis Conjunctive adverb aber ..
jedoch ..
doch ..
allerdings ..
other ..
Paratactic conjunction aber ..
doch ..
Non-tactic asyndetic ..
other ..
Total .(n=).(n=)
142 Mario Bisiada
adverbs are commonly used and decrease slightly in frequency, but paratactic
conjunctions are used notably more frequently now than in 1982/83. The dis-
tribution of the data is statistically significant according to a chi-square test
(χ
2
= 5.98 [df = 2], p= 0.0503).
These observations may signal a trend in preference from a mainly subordi-
native structure using hypotactic conjunctions or conjunctive adverbs towards a
more coordinative structure increasingly relying on paratactic conjunctions. The
diachronic development is visualized in Figure 1, which also shows that there
Table 4: Usage frequencies of conjunctions and adverbs in the parallel corpus.
Hypotactic
conjunctions
Conjunctive
adverbs
Paratactic
conjunctions
other
/  /  /  / 
although n      
f........
 % % % % % %% %
though n   
f........
 % % % %% % % %
even
though
n   
f.....
 % %%%% %%%
while n    
f........
 % % % % % % %%
Total n       
f........
 % % % %% %%%
Figure 1: Diachronic change in translations of English concessive conjunctions: proportional
and normalized frequencies.
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 143
are fewer conjunctions used overall, probably due to a decline of the four
English conjunctions under analysis in the source texts.
A direct comparison between hypotactic and paratactic constructions shows
that, overall, paratactic constructions are only slightly increasing in normalized
frequency (Table 5). The increase in their proportion of the overall amount of
constructions seems to be due to the decline of although, (even) though and while
in the source texts. The decrease in the frequency with which hypotactic con-
structions are used to translate them, on the other hand, is notable in both
normalized and proportional frequency.
The relative frequency ratios for each type of connection yield the graph in
Figure 2. A line has been drawn at y= 1 to show the border between increase
and decrease in frequency (see Section 3.3). The graph confirms that hypotactic
constructions are decreasing to a significant extent. Paratactic constructions are
Table 5: Diachronic change in the taxis of concessive clause complexes in the parallel corpus.
Hypotaxis Parataxis Other
ff f
/ .%.%.%
 .%.%.%
Change .pp +.+pp .pp
Figure 2: Hypotactic and paratactic constructions in the parallel corpus: relative frequency
ratios.
144 Mario Bisiada
made up of conjunctive adverbs and conjunctions, which are shown individually
in this figure. Conjunctive adverbs show no significant change, since the relative
frequency ratio is near 1; only paratactic conjunctions are increasing signifi-
cantly. The overall relative frequency ratio for paratactic constructions, however,
is close to 1, which means that, as argued above, there is no diachronic change
in the actual frequency with which paratactic constructions are used. Thus,
while there is a proportional change between hypotaxis and parataxis, that
change is due to the decrease in frequency in hypotactic constructions, and
not due to an increase in paratactic constructions.
To confirm that these findings are indeed issues of translated language and
not perhaps due to changes made by editors, I have analysed translations of the
four English conjunctions under analysis in the manuscript corpus. The result is
that thirteen clause complexes were translated hypotactically and 62 were
translated paratactically, and in each case only one instance was changed to
the other taxis by the editor, suggesting a low level of editorial influence on this
issue. Therefore, we can conclude that translators seem to be primarily respon-
sible for the decline in frequency of hypotaxis.
As hypotactic conjunctions seem to decline in the parallel corpus over the
analysed time span, we would also expect them to be introduced less commonly
by translators into constructions where the source text does not have a hypotactic
conjunction. However, that does not seem to be the case entirely, as conjunctions
seem to be introduced with increasing frequency (Table 6). Examples below
(3 and 4) show uses of obwohl where the presence of a conjunctive adverb
(given in example [3]) or a preposition (despite in example [4]) in the source
text may have made a structurally equivalent choice more likely.
(3) Why were these attempts to automate the nonstore purchasing of groceries
so short-lived, especially given favorable demographic and lifestyle
trends? (HBR 4/81,75)
Warum waren diese Versuche, den Nonstore-Einkauf von Lebensmitteln
zu automatisieren, so kurzlebig,obwohl die Trends hinsichtlich
Bevölkerungsstruktur und Lebensstils günstig waren? (HBM 4/82,14)
Table 6: Normalized frequency of concessive conjunctions introduced by
the translators.
/ 
obwohl ..
auch wenn ..
doch ..
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 145
(4) However, the councilmen desired to continue the new budget system
despite a lack of significant cost savings or cost reallocations. (HBR 6/77,76)
Die Stadträte wünschten aber, am neuen Budgetierungssystem festzuhalten,
obwohl es zu keiner signifikanten Einsparung oder Neuverteilung von Mitteln
gekommen war. (HBM 1/83,13)
The main findings from the parallel corpus, then, are that there is a strong
decline in hypotactic structures but no notable increase in frequency in para-
tactic structures. The latter have increased their proportion of translation choices
for concessive constructions as a result of a decline in the use of conjunctions in
the source texts in this genre.
While hypotactic conjunctions seem to be used less to translate source text
equivalents, they appear to be introduced more often in cases where the source
text has no conjunction. That may or may not be exclusive to concessive
conjunctions, and may also confirm the view that German still tends to mark
logical relations explicitly in translation (Stein 1979; Hansen Schirra et al. 2007).
4.2 Analysis of the comparable corpus
The comparable corpus exhibits a diachronic increase in normalized frequency
of each construction type (Table 7), which is highly statistically significant
(χ
2
= 13.6 [df = 2], p= 0.0011). This increase is especially strong for paratactic
conjunctions. According to the proportional frequency data, hypotactic conjunc-
tions show no diachronic shift in usage frequency. Paratactic conjunctions are
used proportionally more often, and conjunctive adverbs are used proportion-
ally less often. As is the case in the parallel corpus, then, conjunctive adverbs
behave notably different from paratactic conjunctions within the group of para-
tactic structures.
Table 7: Concessive syntactic function types in the comparable corpus.
Hypotactic
conjunction
Conjunctive
adverb
Paratactic
conjunction
ff f
/ .%.%.%
 .%.%.%
Change +.+pp +.pp +.+pp
146 Mario Bisiada
This may suggest that while the English source texts (and by extension, their
German translations) rely progressively less on conjunctions to express conces-
sion, the use of concessive conjunctions in German is actually increasing, which
is observed in non-translations and, as speculated above, in the rising number
of conjunctions introduced into the translated texts.
The observations in this section are comprehensively displayed in Figure 3.
While hypotaxis is decreasing in frequency in the parallel corpus, it seems to
increase as part of a general increase in connectives in the comparable corpus.
Paratactic conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs, on the other hand, behave
remarkably similarly in the two corpora; the former increase strongly in both
translations and non-translations while the latter show no significant change.
In all, the comparable corpus does not entirely corroborate the findings from the
parallel corpus. Based on the parallel corpus analysis, we would have expected
a decrease in hypotactic structures, which is not the case. Instead, hypotactic
structures remain stable or even increase in frequency somewhat between the
two periods of analysis. Therefore, it seems as though the decrease of hypotactic
constructions in the parallel corpus is not a phenomenon that happens generally
in this genre, but is limited to translated language.
In addition, given the notable decrease in concessive conjunctions in trans-
lated texts (which must be traced to the source texts), it is striking that there is
an increase in concessive conjunctions in non-translated texts. This may show
Figure 3: Hypotactic and paratactic constructions in both corpora: relative frequency ratios.
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 147
that conjunctions are strengthening their positions as the prime way of achiev-
ing cohesion when expressing concessive meaning relations.
5 Sentence-initial concessive conjunctions
5.1 Analysis of the parallel corpus
The sentence-initial concessive conjunction but, which is used with a similar
frequency in 1982/83 and 2008, has been translated in various ways as shown in
Table 8. Among them, sentence-initial doch shows the strongest increase in
frequency ( + 13.5), while the frequencies of sentence-initial aber and of con-
junctive adverbs as translation equivalents have decreased highly statistically
significantly (χ
2
= 11.89 [df = 2], p= 0.0026). Thus, doch is now used as commonly
as aber and conjunctive adverbs to translate sentence-initial but.
Though the conjunction aber decreases in frequency, the overall picture that
emerges is that sentence-initial conjunctions are becoming more popular than
conjunctive adverbs in the translation of but. Together, they have increased by
15 percentage points, almost the same amount that conjunctive adverbs have
lost (Table 8), which may signal an adoption of the source language pattern.
To assess the role of editors in this process, the manuscript corpus has been
analysed in the same way as the parallel corpus. On the whole, editors do not
seem to object to the sentence-initial use of aber. They did intervene in 15 % of
cases, and I will take a closer look at those cases here. Their actions (Table 9)
mostly seem to affect conjunctive adverbs, especially jedoch, which editors swap
for another adverb, conjunction or which they omit entirely.
Table 8: Translations of sentence-initial But into German.
/  Change
ff f
aber .%.%.pp
doch .%.%+.+pp
Conj. adv. .%.%.pp
omitted .%.%.pp
other .%.%+.+pp
Total .  %.  %.
148 Mario Bisiada
While the data are admittedly too small to provide any significant insights, the
editorsconcentration on conjunctive adverbs, especially jedoch (however),
matches the observation that conjunctive adverbs decrease in the translated
texts. Example (5) shows how the conjunctive adverb jedoch in the translated
manuscript (5a) was replaced by sentence-initial aber in the published version
(5b). Thus, there is evidence that the use of sentence-initial aber is not just
driven by translators, but also to some extent by editors, perhaps supporting the
view that sentence-initial conjunctions are becoming an increasingly acceptable
alternative to conjunctive adverbs.
(5) But its not just the physical attributes of a space that influence informal
interactions; proximity,as we use the term, depends on traffic patterns
[...]. (HBR 7/11,102)
a. Beim Aspekt der Nähe und dessen Einfluss auf informelle Kontakte geht
es jedoch nicht nur um den physischen Abstand, sondern auch um
Aufenthaltsmuster [...]. (manuscript25)
b. Aber nicht nur die physischen Eigenschaften eines Raums beeinflussen die
Häufigkeit zufälliger Begegnungen. Nähe, wie wir den Begriff verstehen, hängt
von den Bewegungsmustern der Mitarbeiter ab [...]. (HBM 10/11,46)
5.2 Analysis of the comparable corpus
In analogy to the development in the parallel corpus, the comparable corpus
also exhibits a statistically highly significant (χ
2
= 8.63 [df = 1], p= 0.0033)
increase of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions, especially doch (Table 10).
The frequencies of aber and doch in sentence-initial use in the 1982/83 parallel
Table 9: Editorial changes to translations of sentence-initial But.
Editorial action  instances
No change 
Conj. Conj. adv.
Conj. omitted
Conj. adv. Conj.
Conj. adv. omitted
Change Conj. adv. other
jedoch other Conj. adv.
omitted Conj.
omitted Conj. adv.
other Conj.
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 149
corpus (see Table 8), which only include the translations of sentence-initial but,
are higher than those in the 1982/83 comparable corpus. This suggests that the
use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions was popular in translations
before it became frequent in non-translated language as well, which is a possi-
ble indicator for this shift being motivated by language contact in translation, or
at least contact with English language material.
Overall, then, it seems that there is a tendency in German towards an
increasing use of sentence-initial conjunctions, especially doch, at the expense
of the conventional way of marking concession, such as conjunctive adverbs.
That development can be observed in both translated and non-translated text.
6 Discussion
This diachronic study of taxis in concessive clauses in German business articles
from 1982/83 and 2008 has shown that hypotactic structures are used with
decreasing frequency in that time period in translated language. In that respect,
the genre seems to have undergone a similar change to that found in popular
science by Becher (2011: 195197). It also ties in with my observations on causal
clauses in the business genre, where there is also a decrease in hypotactic
constructions (Bisiada 2013: 22), though hypotaxis is used more often to express
causal relationships than concessive relationships.
In non-translated language, however, there is no sign of such a decrease, as
the frequency of hypotactic constructions in 2008 is significantly higher in the
comparable corpus (52.1) than in the parallel corpus (15.8), while they were
almost the same in 1982/83 (32.4 in the parallel corpus and 35 in the comparable
corpus). Even in translated language, and despite the decrease in frequency they
seem to undergo, there is evidence to suggest that hypotactic conjunctions
remain a common way of combining clauses in this genre as translators
Table 10: Frequencies of sentence-initial aber and doch in the
comparable corpus.
/  Change
nfn f f
aber  ..+.
doch ..+.
Total  .  .+.
150 Mario Bisiada
introduce hypotactic conjunctions into their texts with increasing frequency. As
they are still used in two out of five cases, hypotactic constructions do not seem
to be a marginal phenomenon in business writing, as they seem to be in popular
science (Becher 2011: 197).
At the same time, there is no significant increase in paratactic structures on
the whole, as only paratactic conjunctions are increasing. The decrease in
hypotaxis may be explained by the phenomenon of sentence splitting (see
Bisiada 2014). When sentences with a concessive logical relation are split, a
sentence-initial conjunction is the only feasible way to maintain the connection,
and sentence-initial concessive conjunctions tend to be paratactic aber or doch.
Thus, the decrease in hypotaxis does not mean that hypotaxis is unpopular
(hence its introduction elsewhere), but that sentence splitting takes precedence
over concerns with logical connectivity.
An explanation for the discrepancy between the two genres, which are
similar in that they unite journalistic and scientific discourse features, may be
found in the fact that the overall use of conjunctions in the source texts has
decreased. This phenomenon, i. e. English language users in the business genre
seem to use fewer conjunctions to achieve text cohesion, may have prevented
the notable increase in parataxis that was observed in popular science texts.
More research is necessary to confirm this rather speculative explanation.
Similarities between the genres exist in the use of sentence-initial concessive
conjunctions, which has been found to be increasing in business writing as in
popular science. Becher et al. (2009: 146147) see the increasing frequency of
sentence-initial conjunctions in German popular science texts as an adoption of
Anglophone communicative normsthrough contact with prestigious English
source texts in translation. In business writing, the increasing use of sentence-
initial conjunctions may have been driven by their frequent occurrence in
translations, both as source text equivalents and where they were introduced
by translators. The data show an increase in the use of the conjunction doch
even where the source text clause complex does not have an overt concessive
relationship.
By adopting a method of diachronic corpus investigation of translations and
non-translations in popular science texts, this paper has aimed to replicate the
findings in the business genre. It has found that German language users do not
increasingly prefer paratactic over hypotactic constructions. Though the use of
hypotaxis in concessive constructions has decreased more strongly than in
causal constructions (Bisiada 2013), it continues to be used frequently.
What could be replicated is the finding that concessive conjunctions are
increasingly used in sentence-initial position, mirroring current conventions in
English. As the latter development has been shown to have happened first in
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 151
translations and then in non-translations, existing claims that this change has
been affected by translation can be supported. While the influence of language
contact in translation on language change is hard to prove, the findings dis-
cussed in this paper, at least as far as sentence-initial conjunctions are con-
cerned, lend more support to the method of discovering such change through
diachronic corpus studies.
References
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen. 2002. On the development of final
though: A case of grammaticalization? In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New
reflections on grammaticalization, 345362. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baumgarten, Nicole. 2007. Converging conventions? Macrosyntactic conjunction with English
and and German und.Text & Talk 27(2). 139170.
Baumgarten, Nicole. 2008. Writer construction in English and German popularized academic
discourse: The uses of we and wir.Multilingua 27(4). 409438.
Baumgarten, Nicole & Demet Özçetin. 2008. Linguistic variation through language contact in
translation. In Peter Siemund & Noemi Kintana (eds.), Language contact and contact
languages, 293316. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Becher, Viktor. 2011. Von der Hypotaxe zur Parataxe: Ein Wandel im Ausdruck von Konzessivität
in neueren populärwissenschaftlichen Texten. In Eva Breindl, Gisella Ferraresi & Anna
Volodina (eds.), Satzverknüpfungen. Zur Interaktion von Form, Bedeutung und
Diskursfunktion, 181209. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Becher, Viktor, Juliane House & Svenja Kranich. 2009. Convergence and divergence of com-
municative norms through language contact in translation. In Kurt Braunmüller & Juliane
House (eds.), Convergence and divergence in language contact, 125152. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Bennett, Karen. 2011. The scientific revolution and its repercussions on the translation of
technical discourse. The Translator 17(2). 189210.
Bennett, Karen. 2013. English as a lingua franca in academia: Combating epistemicide through
translator training. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 7(2). 16993.
Bisiada, Mario. 2013. Changing conventions in German causal clause complexes: A diachronic
corpus study of translated and non-translated business articles. Languages in Contrast
13(1). 127.
Bisiada, Mario. 2014. Lösen Sie Schachtelsätze möglichst auf: The impact of editorial
guidelines on sentence splitting in German business article translations. Applied
Linguistics Advance Online Access.
Damerau, Fred J. 1993. Generating and evaluating domain-oriented multi-word terms from texts.
Information Processing & Management 29(4). 433447.
Edmundson, Harold P. & Ronald E. Wyllys. 1961. Automatic abstracting and indexingsurvey
and recommendations. Communications of the ACM 4(5). 226234.
Fischer, Klaus. 2007. Komplexität und semantische Transparenz im Deutschen und Englischen.
Sprachwissenschaft 32(4). 355405.
152 Mario Bisiada
Fischer, Klaus. 2013. Satzstrukturen im Deutschen und Englischen: Typologie und
Textrealisierung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Fitzgerald, Jason C. 2014. An analysis of causal asyndetic constructions in United States history
textbooks. Functional Linguistics 1(5). 117.
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia. 2011. Between normalization and shining-through: Specific properties of
EnglishGerman translations and their influence on the target language. In Svenja
Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder & Juliane House (eds.), Multilingual discourse
production: Diachronic and synchronic perspectives, 135162. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann & Erich Steiner. 2007. Cohesive explicitness and
explicitation in an English-German translation corpus. Languages in Contrast 7(2). 241265.
Hentschel, Elke. 2010. Deutsche Grammatik. Berlin: de Gruyter.
House, Juliane. 2006. Communicative styles in English and German. European Journal of
English Studies 10(3). 249267.
House, Juliane. 2011a. Linking constructions in English and German translated and original
texts. In Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder & Juliane House (eds.), Multilingual
discourse production: Diachronic and synchronic perspectives, 163182. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
House, Juliane. 2011b. Using translation and parallel text corpora to investigate the influence of
global English on textual norms in other languages. In Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach & Jeremy
Munday (eds.), Corpus-based translation studies, 187208. London: Continuum.
Koller, Werner. 1998. Übersetzungen ins Deutsche und ihre Bedeutung für die deutsche
Sprachgeschichte. In Werner Besch, Anne Betten, Oskar Reichmann & Stefan Sonderegger
(eds.), Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung,
210229. Berlin: de Gruyter.
König, Ekkehard, Detlef Stark & Susanne Requardt. 1990. Adverbien und Partikeln: Ein
deutsch-englisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: Groos.
Kranich, Svenja. 2011. To hedge or not to hedge: The use of epistemic modal expressions in
popular science in English texts, English-German translations and German original texts.
Text and Talk 31(1). 7799.
Kranich, Svenja. 2014. Translation as a locus of language contact. In Juliane House (ed.),
Translation: A multidisciplinary approach,96115. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kranich, Svenja, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder. 2011. A tentative typology of translation-
induced language change. In Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder & Juliane House
(eds.), Multilingual discourse production,1144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kranich, Svenja, Juliane House & Viktor Becher. 2012. Changing conventions in EnglishGerman
translations of popular scientific texts. In Kurt Braunmüller & Christoph Gabriel (eds.),
Multilingual individuals and multilingual societies, 315334. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Malamatidou, Sofia. 2013. Passive voice and the language of translation: A comparable corpus-
based study of modern Greek popular science articles. Meta 58(2). 411429.
Manning, Christopher D. & Hinrich Schütze. 1999. Foundations of statistical natural language
processing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Mossop, Brian. 2014. Revising and editing for translators. 3rd edn. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Muñoz Martín, Ricardo. 2010. On paradigms and cognitive translatology. In Gregory M. Shreve
& Erik Angelone (eds.), Translation and cognition, 169187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
EnglishGerman language contact in translation 153
Musacchio, Maria Teresa. 2005. The influence of English on Italian: The case of translations of
economics articles. In Gunilla Anderman & Margaret Rogers (eds.), In and out of English:
For better, for worse? 7196. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Musacchio, Maria Teresa & Giuseppe Palumbo. 2010. Following norms, taking risks: A study of
the use of connectives in a corpus of translated economics articles in Italian. In Carmen
Heine & Jan Engberg (eds.), Reconceptualizing LSP: Online proceedings of the XVII
European LSP symposium 2009,111. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitet.
Neumann, Stella. 2011. Assessing the impact of translations on EnglishGerman language
contact. In Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder & Juliane House (eds.),
Multilingual discourse production: Diachronic and synchronic perspectives, 233256.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stein, Dieter. 1979. Zur Satzkonnektion im Englischen und Deutschen: Ein Beitrag zu einer
kontrastiven Vertextungslinguistik. Folia Linguistica 13. 303319.
Bionote
Mario Bisiada
Mario Bisiada received his PhD in Intercultural and Translation Studies from the University of
Manchester. He is currently lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he is a member of
the Grup dEstudis del Discurs. His research focusses on the corpus-based study of translated
discourse, and he has published on language contact in translation in causal clauses and
sentence splitting. He is currently working on a monograph on the effects of editing on
translated language.
154 Mario Bisiada
... In this context, translationinduced change is a (non-prototypical) form of (indirect) contact, where translators are the main agents of contact, and the contact occurs largely in the written mode, from there disseminating to non-translational usage (see e.g. Bisiada, 2016;Kranich, 2014Kranich, , 2016Malamatidou, 2016;Neumann, 2011;Pang andWang, 2020 -Kotze, 2021 provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art). ...
Article
Full-text available
This article investigates modal auxiliaries in original and translated Afrikaans and South African English parliamentary discourse in the period 1925–1985. Against the background of the sociolinguistic history of language contact in the bilingual South African parliament (1910–1994), it analyses (a) the contrastive differences in the use of modal auxiliaries in South African English and Afrikaans, (b) potential cross-linguistic influence in the use of modals between the two languages, and (c) the way in which contrastive differences and cross-linguistic influence are reflected in translations. In both languages, modal auxiliaries are more common in parliamentary discourse than in general usage. There is little evidence of overall convergence; there are, however, cross-linguistic similarities in specific pragmatic uses of modals in parliament. Translations show a large degree of shining-through from the source text, alongside adjustment to target norms; the tension between these two forces is variable, and influenced by social factors.
... Such language norms can entail differing norms of textual cohesion and conjunction use between languages (see Becher 2011), and the language contact facilitated by translation could even lead to changes in the norms of the target language (Bisiada 2016). Adhering to these cohesive norms of the target language could potentially result in an abundance of zero forms compared to the source, but, crucially, without adversely affecting the cohesion of the target text. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
[Uncorrected Proof] This paper investigates the translation and interpretation of the Hungarian discourse marker vajon in the English to Hungarian translation direction. The study seeks to address issues around the translation of discourse markers, and to examine the functions of utterances in which vajon occurs, applying the so-called translation method on data collected from European Parliamentary speeches. The present paper also investigates the techniques of omission and addition as translation solutions, as these could offer insights into the function of discourse markers, as well as the process of translation. Although the small scale of this study does not support broad generalizations, it is found that vajon is without corresponding source forms. This means that the use of vajon is linked to the functions of vajon-utterances in the source texts, and not to individual linguistic forms. The functions of vajon are given a relevance-theoretic account.
Article
Full-text available
Taking D. L. Everett's controversial analysis of Pirahã as the point of departure, this article revisits J. A. Hawkins's contrastive typology of German and English that - like D. L. Everett's analysis - attempts explanation from one unifying principle. The article analyses a translation corpus and, based on the respective findings, argues that J. A. Hawkins's typology is in need of complementation: both simple and complex German sentences turn out to be less semantically transparent than their English counterparts in a number of respects. The article also addresses the generally accepted complexity differential between the two languages: this decreases if grammatical complexity is not reduced to morphological complexity and if both realisation and text frequency of grammatical categories are considered in the spirit of a typology of parole.
Book
This book is not available for download. You have to buy or borrow it.
Chapter
Translations represent a specific type of language contact. A text is translated from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL) by a bilingual individual, and the product of this process can exhibit an impact of features of the SL on the TT — a phenomenon known as interference. If the same type of interference occurs repeatedly in translations from a SL, the new feature might not remain limited to translated texts. Under favourable circumstances, it might spread to monolingual text production, introducing innovations into non-translated texts produced in the TL.