Francesca at ICLC 11

Last week, LT3’s Francesca Antonioli attended the 11th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC 11) in Prague, where she presented her ongoing PhD research in a talk entitled:

“The influence of structural priming in German-to-Dutch translation: a multi-methods study.”

Her project investigates structural priming — the tendency to repeat recently processed syntactic structures — in German-to-Dutch translation, focusing on voice alternation between agentless passives and generalized actives. To study this, Francesca combines a corpus analysis with an experimental approach, offering complementary insights into how source-language structures influence translation choices.

The corpus study is based on InterCorp (V16UD) and examines manually validated instances of passives and actives to assess whether German source structures systematically impact Dutch translations. The experimental study tested real-time translation choices of 20 German–Dutch bilinguals (with and without translation training), investigating whether structural priming effects occur and whether translators approach these differently from untrained bilinguals.

Together, the two approaches provide valuable preliminary insights into the cognitive processes underlying translation.

Congratulations, Francesca, on a successful presentation at ICLC 11!