This paper deals with a computer-assisted study of a corpus of WHO
publications in English and their translations in Italian, and describes a method
of using a parallel corpus to investigate both linguistic and translation
phenomena, with particular reference to modal auxiliaries. The analysis focuses
on the WordList function of the WordSmith Tools suite to create alphabetical
and frequency-ordered lists of the words found in the corpus, and statistical
information. First, the general features of the source and target texts are
investigated, such as sentence number, mean sentence length, lexical variety
and density, and the incidence of nouns and verbs. Inferences are then made
about the systemic differences between English and Italian as well as the
“universals” of translation.
Secondly, the study concentrates on modality, and wordlists are again used
to analyse the presence of modal expressions in the corpus, and in particular to
compare the incidence of English modals in the source texts and their most
“direct” translations in the target texts. Given the imbalances found, each
modal auxiliary is also analysed through semi-automatic alignment to identify
the main translation strategies used.
