An Exploratory Analysis of TED Talks in English and Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish Translations

What is it about?

This research investigates one of the essential aspects of discourse structure, namely discourse relations, in TED talk transcripts in the source language English and in translations into three languages (Lithuanian, Portuguese, Turkish) of the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank. A complete delineation of discourse structure in the genre of TED talks is not the aim; instead, the current research intends to describe the behaviour of English and three translated languages in conveying discourse relations in a spoken genre in general, and more particularly, the extent to which discourse relations differ in terms of three dimensions (strength of explicitness, their intra-/inter-sentential encoding and their senses) in a multilingual corpus of TED talks. The study shows that while the target languages differ from English in the first two dimensions, they do not display considerable differences in the third dimension. Thus, the similarities and differences among multiple languages in terms of how discourse relations are conveyed in a spoken genre is revealed; the results of the study can give clues about means of local coherence establishment in the languages investigated.

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