_______________________________Since the World Wide Web gained prominence in the mid-1990s it has tantalized language investigators and ins ructors as a virtually unlimited source of machine-readable texts for compiling corpora and developing teaching materials. The broad range of languages and content domains found online also offers translators enormous promise both for translation by-example and as a comprehensive supplement to published reference works This paper surveys the impediments which s ill prevent the Web from realizing its full potential as a linguistic resource and discusses tools to overcome the remaining hurdles. Identifying online documents which are both relevant and reliable presents a major challenge. As a partial solution the author's Web concordancer KWiCFinder au omates the process of seeking and retrieving webpages Enhancements which permit more focused queries than existing search engines and provide search results in an interactive explora ory environmen are described in detail. Despite the efficiency of automated downloading and excerpting, selecting Web documents still entails significant time and effort. To multiply the benefits of a search, an online forum for sharing annotated search reports and linguistically interesting texts with other users is outlined. Furthermore, the orien ation of commercial sea ch engines toward the general public makes them less beneficial for linguistic research. The author sketches plans for a specialized Search Engine for Applied Linguis s and a selective Web Corpus Archive which build on his experience with KWiCFinder. He compares his available and proposed solutions to existing resou ces, and su veys ways to exploi them in language teaching. Together these proposed services will enable language learners and professionals to tap into the Web effectively and efficiently for instruction research and translation. AperitivoAston (2002) compares learner-compiled corpora to professionally produced corpora through a memorable analogy to fruit salad. While home-made fruit salad (and corpora) can entail various benefits he enumerates, the off-the-shelf variety offers reliability and convenience, supplemented in its corpus analogue by documentation and specialized software. He proposes that learners can follow a compromise "pick'n'mix" strategy, compiling their own customized subcorpora from professionally selected materials.1 Research for this paper was supported in part by the Naval Academy Research Council.By now this alimentary analogy (but by no means the strategy) must have passed its "best-by" date, yet I cannot resist adapting it to the World Wide Web. Food-borne analogies seem very appropriate for a conference in Bertinoro, the historic town of culinary and oenological hospitality, so I begin and end on this note.For years the Web has tantalized language professionals, offering a boundless pool of texts whose fruitful exploitation has remained out of reach. It is like an old-fashioned American community potluck supper, to which each family brings a d...
No abstract
The opposition of translation into the mother tongue (L1 translation) vs. translation into the foreign language (L2 translation), with its clear relationship of superiority/inferiority in translation circles, is just one of a series of binary oppositions prevalent in the literature with an apparently similar relationship. These include principally (i) target language vs. source language, and (ii) original texts vs. translated texts. This paper examines what implications such oppositions might have for the L1 translation vs. L2 translation issue, particularly within the developing field of corpus linguistics, subsequently taking a look at some L1 and L2 translations and reflecting upon their degree of acceptability or unacceptability in the light of the discussions proposed.
The status of English as an international language means that in language learning and translational contexts it has become a moving target. Within translational contexts the issue is especially relevant to translations into English where the envisaged readership is international. This paper discusses issues which arise from translations of Italian tourist texts into English submitted by a group of advanced-level Italian university students. Translation of this nature entails a transition from the local to the global for the benefit of mostly non-native speakers of English, but such a shift is not without complications. One of these is that from an early age Italian students are nurtured on Standard British English and that codified target-language parameters are easily accessed for Standard British English, but not for English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). At the same time, knee-jerk insistence on a major variety of English has its pitfalls; the translator must be sensitive to the fact that the envisaged target readers, extremely heterogeneous on account of their vastly different levels of linguistic and cultural competence, may read off diverse meanings from a single text, or at least react to it in diverse ways. The second half of the paper provides a range of examples of student translations into English for an envisaged international readership.
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