Corpora in Translation

Abstract

Please respect intellectual property rightsThis material is copyright and its use is restricted by our standard site license terms and conditions (see http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/connect/info/terms_conditions.html). If you plan to copy, distribute or share in any format including, for the avoidance of doubt, posting on websites, you need the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. To request permission please contact rights@palgrave.com. 178 Corpus resources and tools have come to play an increasingly important role both in Translation Studies research and in translation practices. In Translation Studies, corpora have provided a basis for empirical descriptive research. Corpus-based studies usually involves the comparison of two (sub) corpora, in which translated texts are compared with either their source texts (parallel corpus) or with another (sub)corpus constructed according to similar design criteria (comparable corpus), either in the same or in another language.These corpora are used to investigate regularities of translated texts, regularities of translators and regularities of languages. Regularities of translation may consist either of universal features which are hypothesised to be distinctive of translated texts as opposed to non-translated texts, or of translation norms and strategies which characterise texts translated under specific social and historical circumstances. Regularities of translators are individual linguistic habits manifested through consistently different (unconscious) patterns of choices, independently of the source texts. Parallel corpora are used, together with bilingual or multilingual comparable corpora, to compare and contrast regularities of languages. Bilingual and multilingual corpora have also found application in translator education. Parallel corpora offer learners a repository of translators' strategies and choices, while comparable corpora provide them with a mapping of the words and structures employed by different linguistic communities for building discourse. Approaches to corpus use in translator education include both training in computer-assisted translation and experiential approaches to corpus use. Practical applications of corpora in translation comprise resources and tools for assisted and automatic translation, including translation memories and corpus-based statistical machine translation. This chapter provides an overview of how corpora are used for descriptive and applied purposes, and discusses research findings and implications for translation trainees, professionals and users.

Revisiting corpus creation and analysis tools for translation tasks

“…Bowker, 1998;Zanettin et al, 2003) and have been proposed as aids in a professional environment, both in translation (cf. Bernardini and Castagnoli, 2008;Zanettin, 2002a) and in interpreting (cf. Fantinuoli, 2012;Gorjanc, 2006) settings.…”

“…Since corpora are especially used in the context of specialized translation (Beeby et al, 2009) and since there is no ready-to-use corpus for any specialized subject and language, translators need to create their own corpus prior to a translation assignment or project. The compilation of these types of corpora, which are referred to as ad-hoc (Aston, 1999), disposable (Varantola, 2003) or DIY (Zanettin, 2002a) corpora, is not straightforward. The process of collecting and creating a corpus is generally time-consuming if done manually, for example by downloading texts from the web, or requires the use of extra software for automatic compilation.…”

Developing and exploiting linguistic resources in research and in the didactics of Specialised Translation

“…Such a standardisation can in fact be the result of "negative interference" (sensu Toury, 1995) and, by means of the translation process, can negatively alter the linguistic potential of languages that are used less in specific domains of (specialised) communication 11 . Moreover, the "mechanisation" (or "industrialisation") of the translation process and the consequent demand for increasing the speed and the efficiency of translation by means of TM systems, has been observed to "decontextualise" (Zanettin, 2002) the observation and the description of discourse, both of that is primarily produced, and of that is produced through translation. The problems and shortcomings outlined above, which under certain circumstances can have a negative impact on the didactic aims of the translation classroom, can be significantly overcome with the systematic use of specialised tools and resources that are more focused on the translation process and its inherent problems.…”

JaSlo: Integration of a Japanese-Slovene Bilingual Dictionary with a Corpus Search System

“…Their use has been advocated by translator trainers (Zanettin, 2002;Bernardini & Castagnoli, 2008) and translation theorists (Baker, 1995).…”