Anaphora and translation discrepancies from English to Thai: a centering theory analysis

Abstract

Anaphors are used for referring and maintaining coherence in discourse. Choices of anaphor relevant to the salience of its referent entity, as well as anaphor distribution, are governed by discourse structure, which differs from language to language. In translation, anaphor cannot always be converted from the source language to the target language by means of the direct translation method. The present study is interested in investigating discrepancies in the translation of anaphor from English (source text) to Thai (target text). Centering theory was adopted in the analysis of the use and translation of anaphors in parallel corpus. It was found that the Personal Pronoun was the most preferred form in the Continuation state in source texts, and the Zero Pronoun was the most preferred form in the Continuation state in target texts whereas the Definite Noun Phrase was the most preferred form in the no-transition category for both languages. In addition, the uses of anaphor in both languages complied with the notion of Centering theory. In terms of translation, the majority of anaphors was translated into the same anaphor types. However, it was found that some anaphors were translated into different types. Such discrepancies in translation could be explained with Centering theory. CT-transition states corresponded to the anaphor forms in the data. It was found that when the transition flows between source text and target text were different, anaphors are likely to change form, on the other hand, when transition flows between source text and target text were similar, anaphors were likely to remain in the same forms or were translated to a more salient form. Translation of anaphoric devices from English to Thai was governed by anaphor interpretation, salience of entities, syntactic constraint, coherence, and naturalness of translation.