The use of the Historical Thesaurus of English in Translation Studies

What is it about?

This article proposes that the consideration of translation equivalences for lexical items in English benefits from reference to the diachronic digital resources of Historical Thesaurus of English and its offshoot projects, Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus, and the Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches semantic tagger (SAMUELS). These resources are the result of a long-term endeavour to code every sense of every headword in the lexicographical record of the English language. There has to date been little research into the relevance of these resources to the translation challenges raised by synonymy, polysemy, and the semantic radiation of lexical items. The relevance of these resources and their potential application to the study of equivalence in translation is illustrated with reference to a selection of semantic domains in a Portuguese and a Chinese translation of Jack London’s 'The Call of the Wild'.

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Why is it important?

This article is important because it combines several digital lexical resources with corpus analysis within the framework of Translation Studies. Until now, the semantic analysis of words in Corpus Translation Studies has been largely synchronic; this article considers the impact of the Historical Thesaurus of English on diachronic studies of word meanings . In simple terms, how does the evolving history of the meaning of words across languages, and the way they are related to concepts, impact on the ways in which they are translated?

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