A new look at modulation

When we investigate a large corpus of translations, we find many instances where a source text expression is translated in a large number of different ways in the target text. One way to interpret these findings is to use the concept of MODULATION, defined by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) as "un changement de point de vue". Their definition is rather vague, and the examples that they and other scholars use to illustrate the concept are wide-ranging. By analysing various translations of the same expression, however, it is possible to define the concept more restrictively and to shed light on the data. I use examples from German-English and English-French data taken from the INTERSECT translation corpus and propose a conceptual framework, based on Relevance Theory, in which modulation finds a natural place.