Creatures of Habit? What Translators Usually Do with Words

This paper focuses on some of the methodological and theoretical challenges presented by the investigation of "sanitisation" in translated texts through the analysis of semantic prosody. The main hypothesis is that target texts tend to use toned down vocabulary compared with their sources, and that this results in the creation of a "sanitised version of the original." The creative potential of language is undeniable, but the concordances to a corpus remind us forcibly that in most of our utterances we are creatures of habit, immensely predictable, rehearsing the same old platitudes and the same old clichés in almost everything we say. If it were not so, language would become unworkable. Humankind cannot bear very much creativity.