Extending the boundaries in descriptive translation analysis: A text mining approach

The notion of 'translational norms' was introduced by Gideon Toury in the late 1970s within Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). The aim was to describe and explain translations to make generalizations regarding translational behavior. Toury deems examination of everything "untenable" due to human limitation. In this thesis, I argue that text mining can facilitate exhaustive analysis on 'operational norms.' Text mining is the automated analysis of text data to extract and discover new information. For the purpose of this research, a customized tool was designed by a software developer. In order to test the effectiveness of the software versus human effort, the corpus of a master's thesis was taken as a reference point to compare the results. The corpus underwent a preparation stage for achieving optimal results. After processing the corpus, operational norms were extracted to be interpreted. Consequently, the study provides results that cannot be obtained by sole human effort and enables researchers to gain further insights about the analyzed translations. This research therefore has a potential for making notable contribution to DTS. Further efforts are needed to improve the tool and verify its viability for different text types to ensure such contribution.