Between Humans and the Rest of the Natural World: A Corpus-Based Study of Popular Science Articles in Translation with a Focus on Human Categories

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of popular science articles published in Scientific American and translated into Polish. Its aim is to analyze how lexemes denoting human categories such as “human”, “people” and “person” are translated in popular science texts and to establish whether there are shifts in those categories that may lead to modifying the way of depicting human relationships to other animals or the environment, especially by emphasizing or attenuating anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism expressed in texts. The bilingual corpus used in this study comprises 184 pairs of source and target texts from the English-language version of Scientific American translated into Polish and published between January 2019 and January 2023 in Świat Nauki (the Polish edition of Scientific American). The design for this study included corpus creation and compilation, exploration of word lists, concordance and parallel concordance for the translation of human categories. The findings suggest that human categories are usually sustained in target texts and human relationship to other animals or the environment is also sustained in translation. However, there are also moderately frequent shifts in explicitness, occasionally accompanied by sentence structure change, resulting in changes in the perceived human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism and emphasizing or attenuating human agency in environmental depletion.