Verbs of perception and evidentiality in English/French translation

Differences between verbs of perception in English and French have often been a subject of theoretical conjecture, but seldom studied empirically. Four such verbs (En. hear, see, Fr. entendre, voir) were thus inventoried in a 13.5m-word bidirectional English/French translation corpus. A statistically significant difference between translators and authors was found for hear and entendre. Correlations between source and target texts were statistically significant for all verbs. Quantitative analysis of random samples revealed five regular alternatives to word-for-word translation. Qualitative data support the hypothesis that verbs of perception may follow different "evidential strategies" in English and French. An approach combining quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify translators closest to target language norms offers a new model for researchers and translators.