Building a trilingual parallel corpus to analyse literary translations from German into Basque

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the steps we undertook to build our multilingualaligned parallel corpus created to analyse translations from German into Basque and to report initial results. Translation into Basque is a quite complex phenomenon, and this complexity is reflected in the design of the corpus. When carrying out research into literary translations from German into Basque, we deal with direct translations from German into Basque, but also with indirect translations through Spanish versions. In order to observe both texts in the case of direct translations and all three texts for indirect translations, we have created an aligned, parallel, trilingual corpus. We have also created a search engine which is linked to the corpus. This allows for easy queries and obtains results from both direct and indirect translations. The research carried out with the corpora presented in this paper has revealed cases of standardisation and interference. Evidence for both of Toury’s (2012) translation laws are identified in direct as well as indirect translation.