| The textual turn in translation studies in the 1980s shifted the focus of translation research from smaller, sub-sentential textual units, such as words and phrases, to global features that run throughout entire texts, such as cohesion, coherence, and other features of textual organization (Neubert & Shreve 1992). Nevertheless, in the current practice of translation, where content is translated by teams of translators using a variety of technologies, such as translation memories and machine translation, the focus often shifts back to sub-sentential segments, threatening the maintenance of a global textual orientation. These realities of the industry make the need for empirical studies of cohesive and other global textual features of vital importance. Additionally, given the explosive growth of machine translation in recent years, it seems relevant to supplement the studies of global features in human-translated texts by similar studies of machine-translated output.;This empirical corpus-based study compares the use of cohesive devices and other global textual features across three corpora organized by genre (literary, newspaper, and scientific). Each of these corpora was divided into three sub-corpora based on the method of text production: texts written in English (non-translated texts), texts translated into English from Russian by human translators (human-translated texts), and texts translated into English from Russian by a machine translation tool (machine-translated texts). This study applies a more comprehensive approach than has been used earlier for analyzing global features of texts produced by different methods in corpora of different text-types. It employs the framework for studying cohesive and other global features of texts suggested by Dong and Lan (2010), who combined Halliday & Hasan's pioneering ideas for studying cohesion in English (1976) with Campbell's construct of textual competence (1998). In addition to reference and conjunction cohesive devices, this study looks at nominalization, lexical density, average word length, average sentence length, passives, and prepositional phrases.;The study sheds light on global characteristics of translated texts---whether and to what extent human and machine translations differ from non-translated texts---contributing to existing studies of translation universals and laws of translation. Furthermore, by including machine-translated texts as a third dimension of research, in addition to the more typically studied non-translated and human-translated texts, this study addresses questions of whether translation universals and laws of interference are at work in machine-translated texts to the same extent as in human-translated texts. The study also includes a comparison of genre-specific characteristics of literary, newspaper, and scientific texts across non-translated, human-translated, and machine-translated corpora.;The results of this study are then used to design practical recommendations for translators, editors of human and machine translations, translation evaluators, and translator trainers. |
