Download IATE as a Resource for Teaching Names in the Translation and Interpreting Classroom

Abstract

Proper names are a minoritarian yet fairly controversial topic in translation and interpreting literature. Some authors believe that they have been traditionally disregarded, becoming «one of translation’s coziest fortresses» (Albin, 2003); however, a number of prominent translation and interpreting scholars have explicitly studied proper names (Hermans, 1988; Moya Jiménez, 2001; Nord, 2003), and a stream of recent publications underline the challenge they represent in fields as varied as biomedicine (Cariello et al., 2021), literature (Jouini, 2020; Sarmaşık, 2022) and the law (Tang, 2021), among others. This paper proposes the integration of terminology databases and onomastics for interpreter and translator training. We will adopt a constructionist approach (cf. Goldberg, 1995). The download functionality of the terminology management system IATE is employed to extract a reliable English-Spanish dataset of 3,997 organization names, which is first analyzed in a quantitative-qualitative manner, and then exploited to design three templates (easy, medium, and advanced) aimed at bilingual naming practice. Results show a generally rich and robust dataset, with 96% cascading domain names, 66% marked as very reliable and only 8% as deprecated or obsolete. By contrast, most names (75%) were labelled as terms, which shows no consideration for their onymic nature and small or no relevance of other specialized knowledge representations (abbreviations, phrases, short terms, and non-linguistic forms). The proposed templates extensively develop a Goldbergian-style notation system for construction, and their flexibility and replicability make them a good candidate for automatization and/or combination with documentation resources and NLP-based tools throughout the learning process.