Expanding the Horizons of Translation-Induced Language Change

This book offers a comprehensive examination of translation-induced language change, arguing for a view of translation as a language contact scenario supported by case studies from multilingual texts on migration.

The volume explores how language change arises through contact between languages in translation with linguistic features carrying over from a source text and becoming embedded, over time, in a target language. Clay applies this theory to a number of novel contexts, including migration terminology in multilingual legal texts and newspaper articles, and observes it using innovative quantitative and qualitative methodologies. This phenomenon is observed through in-depth corpus-based case studies involving English, French, and Italian to show the potential for translation to shape terminology in the field of migration across different genres. The volume also extends its conclusions to consider the ways in which this approach might be applied to other domains and new methodologies might be developed in response.

This book will appeal to scholars interested in the intersection of language and the law, in such fields as translation studies, corpus linguistics, and terminology.