Corpus Design

4.1.1 Corpus Design

According to Fernandes (2004), success of corpus-based work is intrinsically dependent on the purpose of its creation and its association to issues such as ‘representativeness, copyright, and selection of texts.’ (p. 75). In order to understand the research object and the purpose, I have described the corpus by procedures of classification and contextualization, which are based on the works of Baker (1998), Olohan (2004), Sardinha (2004) e Sinclair (2001). These procedures come in an attempt to explain the purpose for which this corpus is classified as a Small-Scale Bilingual Parallel Corpus.

Following from that, I turn now to outline the publishing features of the original and its translation with a view to contextualizing them.

4.1.1.1. Type

The concept of corpus applied in this piece of research is that of the Small-Scale Bilingual Parallel Corpus. This classification derives from certain definitions provided by scholars cited further. For instance, the corpus under analysis is not categorized as Small-Scale because of number of tokens, but rather strictly because the corpus is

designed for Early Human Intervention – EHI – as defined by Sinclair (2001)¹⁰; it is as well a Parallel Corpora, as once defined by Baker (1998, p. 51), because it is a collection of texts originally written in a language A aligned¹¹ with its translation to a language B”; Olohan (2004, p. 24) corroborates Baker’s view regarding a typological distinction, which she defines Bilingual Parallel Corpora as a ‘…corpus that consists in a series of text in a language and its translation into another’. So the type of corpus under investigation is classified as Small-Scale Bilingual Parallel Corpus.

4.1.1.2. Contextual information of the corpus

Now that the concept of Small-Scale Bilingual Parallel Corpus has been made clear I proceed to outline the contextual information, or the ‘extralinguistic features’ (cf. Baker cited in Fernandes, 2004) of the corpus. As reminded by Fernandes (2004), the identification, description and documentation of extralinguistic information has been acknowledged by many researchers carrying out corpus-based investigations, such as Sinclair (1991), Laviosa (1997), and Baker (2002) (p.85). Sinclair, for instance, claims that contextual information allows critics and users of the corpus to consider the constitution and balance as a separated matter from the corpus linguistic evidence (1991, p. 97). Laviosa claims that such contextual information has ‘intrinsic value as objects of study in themselves’ (1997, p. 303). Baker (2002) argues that the documentation of such contextual information ‘… can be used as a bridge-gapping tool for linking linguistic and cultural modes of analysis (cited in Fernandes, 2004). These

10 Complete Passage: “the so-called Small Corpora are those designed for early human intervention (EHI), while de Large Corpora are designed for late human intervention (DHI). (...) The researches have the clear goal in mind, and they build a corpus for an investigation or if they are lucky enough, use one that is already available. The processing is usually with standard tools, so packages like WordSmith are invaluable for EHI but occasionally these are adapted, or special ones devised for the job”

11 They are set side-by-side or aligned by means of computational tools that work with concordances, which is the case of WordSmith Tools (Sardinha, 2004, p.187; Austermühl, 2001, p. 129).

relevant statements support the collection features which associate the collected data with the context of the work.

Having that in mind, I turn now to briefly outline the story of the corpus under analysis. “Flores Raras e Banalíssimas” (Oliveira, 1995) portrays a fictional biography of the love-and-hate relationship of two distinguished figures of their time – Lota de Macedo Soares and Elizabeth Bishop. This story takes place majorly in Brazil, from the 50’s to the 60’s, when the country experienced great political changes. The North-American poet Elizabeth Bishop travels to Brazil, where she meets a very intriguing and notorious figure of Rio de Janeiro’s aristocracy, Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom Bishop falls in love for the first years of her stay in Brazil. The love of both characters, however, declines as Lota becomes strongly obsessed with her work at ‘supervising the conversion of a huge area of landfill into Rio’s most extensive waterfront park, Parque do Flamengo’ (trans. Besner, 2002, p. x) while Bishop’s lack of motivation for writing and publishing her poems swerves her carrier to an opportunity as a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, USA. During most part of the storyline, both protagonists live together at Lota’s awarded-house in Samambaia, where they receive the company of intellectual and political personalities from Brazil and elsewhere, such as Aldous Huxley, Antonio Callado and Carlos Lacerda.

Also, the words of the translator reporting the process of translating Oliveira’s book contribute to the contextual information of the corpus. It is interesting to observe that in the words of the translator, Neil Besner, Carmen Oliveira’s work has been transformed into a Brazilian biography of an American poet. As pointed out by Besner (2000, p. 58), ‘... the American interest be caught first by their Pulitzer-prize winning poet’s sojourn in exotic Brazil, and only second […] by the fact that Bishop lived with, loved, was loved by, an extraordinary woman such as Lota de Macedo Soares.’.

Moreover, Besner states that ‘… in Portuguese, Bishop is an American poet, shy, reclusive; apparently, under many Brazilian eyes, nastily critical and dismissive of Brazilian cultures; transparently, under North American eyes then and certainly now, the greatest modern North American poet to write “about” Brazil in her poetry’ (Besner, 2000, p. 58).

Another element which supports the contextualization of the data is the reversal in the books subheadings. In Portuguese it is conveyed as "A História de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop”, in English the subheading conveys a reversal of the names so that it becomes “The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares”. The following figure provides the illustration of both book covers:

Figure 5 Book covers of Flores Raras e Banalíssimas (1995) and Rare and Commonplace Flowers (2002)

Other features that support the comprehension of the work are available at the table below, containing detailed documentation of the corpus:

Contextual

Information of the

Contextual

Information of the

Table 11: Contextual Information of the T and RT

In this sub-section, I have presented a number of extralinguistic features such as a brief overview of “Flores Raras e Banalíssimas” (Oliveira, 1995), the translator’s

Author/Translator Carmen Oliveira Neil Besner Number of words

Publishing Location Rio de Janeiro New Brunswick, New Jersey

perspective of translating this book, book covers, genre and records that allow the researcher and the readers to visualize the contextual features which help in the interpretation of the data observed in this corpus.

4.1.1.3. Data Source configuration

Throughout the development of this research, I have carried out three pilot studies with a view to testing the behavior of the material in hand. Three samples of the book were analyzed in previous studies. Results of these studies provided support for the investigation of all chapters of the corpus. For instance, the first study, presented in the form of an article, focuses on the analysis of Processes in the second chapter of the book, “Ó, Turista!” and its translation to English “Oh, Tourist!”. Partial results corroborate the hypothesis of change in the construal of Bishop’s Ideational profile for the North-American audience. In the textualized chapter, the Participant Bishop is construed as majorly experiencing Mental Processes (32% out of the total), whereas in the retextualized chapter the Participant Bishop is mostly involved in Material Processes (31% out of the total) (Pires, 2006 p. 821).

This work was carried out at the same time as the sample of the first five chapters analysis, presented as my final paper during the undergraduate Letras-Inglês program at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, in 2006. These first five chapters caused second thoughts over the sampling methods used in study reported above. Percentage unveiled even in both texts: 39% of Mental Processes in the T and RT, confronting the hypothesis of change in the ideational profile of Elizabeth Bishop.

With both results in hands, I could observe that Material and Mental Processes had significant chances of configuring Bishop’s Ideational Profile in either text.

However, I could only confirm or refute the hypothesis of change in Bishop’s Ideational

profile by increasing the amount of data through all chapters in which Bishop is a Participant – also important to examine weather she is an active or passive role – head of the nominal group.

One last work completes the threefold sample. One of PGI’s Master Program disciplines I have enrolled was Corpus Linguistics, which rendered a final paper testing the same hypothesis in the last five chapters of both books. The results revealed a high percentage of Material Processes emerged in the T and RT, 35% and 37% respectively.

Although results in this last study also refute the hypothesis of change in Bishop’s Ideational profile, they indicate New Construction of Processes in the Retextualization, which is for instance a Material Process being retextualized as Mental Process.

These previous results show us that (i) there is a tendency of Bishop being construed as experiencing a more Material and Mental mode, and (ii) her Ideational profile changes according to the scope (the chapters selected) used for analysis. Thus, the observation of this phenomenon motivated the analysis in all chapters of the corpus.

A further survey on the corpus separated by chapter has been carried out by means of WordSmith’s tool Wordlist (Scott, 1999). These lists show a great concentration of the node “Bishop” in the middle of the book as well. So in an attempt to configure the data source, all chapters of the corpus under study have been taken into account in order to analyze the construal of Bishop’s Ideational Profile.