A tradução de sintagmas nominais por bilíngues com inglês como L2

Abstract

When a translation is performed, the main concern is that the target text has the same meaning as the source text. However, syntactic structure maintenance can also occur, especially when dealing with non-professional translators. In this research, the main objective was to analyze how bilinguals with English as a foreign language usually translate noun phrases with possession effect between nouns. We also aimed to: (1) investigate which syntactic construction bilinguals use in translations of sentences with noun phrases that present a relationship of possession between nouns; (2) examine whether bilinguals are able to reproduce the noun phrase not prepositioned in the target translation with noun phrase with possession relation between nouns in the sense L1→ L2; and (3) analyze whether there is a significant difference in syntactic choices and response time in the different phases of the study. The theoretical basis of this study is based on the following themes: (1) translation studies, (2) Psycholinguistics of bilingualism, (3) syntactic priming and (4) noun phrases. To achieve the presented objectives, we carried out an experiment that included a pre-test, two translation tasks and a post-test, with 20 high school students from public schools in the State of Ceará, who were studying English as L2 at Centro Cearense de Languages. The translation tasks of the experiment used the syntactic priming paradigm as a pedagogical strategy and the researched structure was the noun phrase with relation of possession between nouns. The instruments of this research were: consent form; term of consent; pre-test, two translation tasks and post-test applied in the PsyToolkit software (STOET, 2010, 2017); English language vocabulary knowledge test; and biographical and linguistic questionnaire. The results showed that the participants were able to use more times the same syntactic structure of the prime translations in the production of their translations, as well as in Resende, Cowan and Way (2020) and Maier (2008) in the translation tasks. Statistical analyzes in RStudio, through the Generalized Mixed Linear Model and the Mixed Linear Model, showed that there was a reduction in the cost of processing the English language in the post-test. These conclusions may indicate that there was implicit learning of the researched syntactic structure and that translation can be a good pedagogical tool in foreign language teaching-learning, especially when it comes to grammatical aspects.