The ATA Chronicle - July/August 2022 - 35

RESOURCE REVIEW By Abigail Dahlberg
Bonanza! Striking Translation
Gold by Mining Parallel Texts
L
et me start with a
confession: I barely
passed translation
theory in college. I scraped
by with a C after several
nights in a row of frantic
caffeine-fueled essay
writing. The problem?
Theory bored me. If you
talked to me about coherence
and calque my eyes glazed
over. Back then, I just wanted
to translate. I didn't want
to think about the reasons
why I made specific choices.
And I certainly didn't want
to spend too much time
mulling over equivalence,
effectiveness, Skopos Theory,
and all their friends.
After graduation, I
consigned translation theory
to the deepest, darkest
corners of my mind. And
that's where it stayed. Over
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the years, I started to think
more about why I chose to
translate a certain way. I
attended a few presentations
at ATA Annual Conferences
given by translators1
who discussed how they
justified their approaches to
translating texts into English
using their own research.
It seemed that drawing on
parallel texts-documents in
the source or target language
that are similar to the text
to be translated in terms of
subject or text type-also
helped them demonstrate
their value as an expert
to clients.
I was intrigued. And when
another client email arrived
asking why I turned a long
passive German sentence
(with, no kidding, 47 words)
into three shorter active
English sentences, I knew I
wanted some firm evidence to
back up my approach.
The Project
I was translating more and
more sustainability reports
at the time, so this felt
like a logical place to start
researching parallel texts.
My plan was simple (or so I
thought): find 50 Germanlanguage
and 50 Englishlanguage
sustainability
reports and compare them. (I
use the term " sustainability
report " here, but companies
also refer to these kinds of
reports as environmental,
social, and governance [ESG]
reports, corporate social
responsibility [CSR] reports,
non-financial reports, or
integrated reports, among
other names.)
How did I choose which
reports to use? Well, this
was where the problems
started. From experience, I
knew that a sustainability
report could range from
a few simple data-heavy
pages to several hundred
sheets filled with extensive
details of everything that
the company had achieved
in the past year. To achieve
comparability, I focused on
the chief executive officer's
letter, which is a feature
found at the beginning of
most reports. I also searched
for reports covering the 2020
financial year to see the
language that executives, or
their ghostwriters, had used
to describe the challenges
brought on by the pandemic.
(Perhaps unsurprisingly,
the word " unprecedented "
appeared frequently.)
Another issue was that
many of the reports I
initially found were written
by non-native speakers or
translated from another
language into English. For
the purposes of my project, I
decided to focus on Germanlanguage
reports from
German, Austrian, and Swiss
businesses and Englishlanguage
reports from
companies based in Australia,
Canada, the U.K., and the
U.S.-not a perfect metric,
but a solid starting point.
To ensure I included
examples of the best in
sustainability reporting,
I also trawled through
lists of the best reports
written within the past
few years and searched for
reporting by the leading
players across various
industries. I also tried to find
examples of how smaller
companies reported on their
American Translators Association 35
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