1st Edition

Translation-Driven Corpora Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies

By Federico Zanettin Copyright 2012
    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    Electronic texts and text analysis tools have opened up a wealth of opportunities to higher education and language service providers, but learning to use these resources continues to pose challenges to scholars and professionals alike. Translation-Driven Corpora aims to introduce readers to corpus tools and methods which may be used in translation research and practice. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of corpus creation and use. An introduction to corpora and overview of applications of corpus linguistics methodologies to translation studies is followed by a discussion of corpus design and acquisition. Different stages and tools involved in corpus compilation and use are outlined, from corpus encoding and annotation to indexing and data retrieval, and the various methods and techniques that allow end users to make sense of corpus data are described. The volume also offers detailed guidelines for the construction and analysis of multilingual corpora.

    Corpus creation and use are illustrated through practical examples and case studies, with each chapter outlining a set of tasks aimed at guiding researchers, students and translators to practice some of the methods and use some of the resources discussed. These tasks are meant as hands-on activities to be carried out using the materials and links available in accompanying downloadable resources. Suggested further readings at the end of each chapter are complemented by an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume.

    Translation-Driven Corpora is designed for use by teachers and students in the classroom or by researchers and professionals for self-learning. It is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this fast growing area of scholarly and professional activity.

    1. Introduction
    1.1 Book outline
    1.2 How to use the DVD


    2. Corpus linguistics and translation studies
    2.1 A typology of translation-driven corpora
    2.2 Corpus-based translation research
    2.2.1 Regularities of translations
    2.2.1.1 Simplification
    2.2.1.2 Explicitation
    2.2.1.3 Standardization
    2.2.1.4 Translation of unique items
    2.2.1.5 Untypical collocations
    2.2.1.6 Interference
    2.2.2 Regularities of translators
    2.2.3 Regularities of languages
    2.2.4 Learner translation corpora
    2.2.5 Interpreting and multimodal corpora
    2.3 Corpus-based translation teaching and learning
    2.4 Computer-assisted translation and computational linguistics
    2.5 Tasks
    2.5.1 Experimenting with the TEC
    2.5.2 Experimenting with COMPARA
    2.5.3 Experimenting with the LTC
    2.6 Further reading


    3. Corpus design and acquisition
    3.1 Corpus design
    3.1.1 Size
    3.1.2 Composition
    3.1.3 Representativeness and comparability
    3.1.4 Case study: the CEXI corpus
    3.2 Corpus acquisition and copyright
    3.3 Web corpora
    3.3.1 The Web as corpus
    3.3.2 The Web as a source of corpora
    3.3.2.1 General Web corpora
    3.3.2.2 Specialized Web corpora
    3.4 Conclusions
    3.5 Tasks
    3.5.1 Corpus building project outline
    3.5.2 Manual creation of a DIY monolingual corpus
    3.5.3 Automatic creation of a DIY bilingual comparable corpus

    3.6 Further reading


    4. Corpus encoding and annotation
    4.1 Corpus-based translation studies and corpus annotation
    4.2 Annotation for descriptive translation studies
    4.2.1 Documentary information
    4.2.2 Structural information
    4.2.3 Text-linguistic information
    4.3 Stand-off annotation
    4.4 Conclusions
    4.5 Tasks
    4.5.1 Creating an XML TEI document
    4.5.2 Adding a simple header
    4.5.3 Marking-up text structure
    4.5.4 Adding linguistic annotation
    4.5.5 Indexing the corpus
    4.5.6 Searching the corpus
    4.6 Further reading


    5. Corpus tools and corpus analysis
    5.1 Corpus creation and analysis tools
    5.1.1 Text acquisition
    5.1.2 Annotation
    5.1.3 Corpus management and query systems
    5.1.4 Data retrieval and display
    5.2 Analysis of corpus data
    5.2.1 Wordlists and basic statistics
    5.2.2 Concordances
    5.2.3 Collocations, clusters and clouds
    5.2.4 Colligations and word profiles
    5.2.5 Semantic associations
    5.3 Conclusions
    5.4 Tasks
    5.4.1 Wordlists
    5.4.2 Lists of lemmas
    5.4.3 Keywords
    5.4.4 Concordances
    5.4.5 Collocations and clusters
    5.4.6 Word profiles
    5.5 Further reading and software


    6. Creating multilingual corpora
    6.1 Corpus acquisition
    6.1.1 Comparable corpora
    6.1.2 Parallel corpora
    6.2 Alignment
    6.2.1 Paragraphs and sentences
    6.2.2 Approaches and tools
    6.3 Case study: the OPUS corpus
    6.4 Parallel corpora and translation memories
    6.5 Alignment below sentence level
    6.5.1 Alignment of comparable corpora
    6.5.2 Word alignment
    6.6 Tasks
    6.6.1 Aligning a text pair
    6.6.2 A parallel corpus of literary texts
    6.6.3 Corpus creation checklist
    6.7 Further reading and software


    7. Using multilingual corpora
    7.1 Comparable and parallel corpora
    7.2 Display and analysis of parallel corpora
    7.3 Case study: The Rushdie English-Italian parallel corpus
    7.4 Case study: the OPUS Word alignment database
    7.5 Multilingual corpora in translator training and practice
    7.6 Tasks
    7.6.1 Searching a parallel corpus of literary texts
    7.6.2 Exploring the Europarl multilingual corpus
    7.7 Further reading


    8. Conclusions

    Biography

    Federico Zanettin is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Perugia. He is the editor of Comics in Translation (2008), and co-editor of Corpora in Translator Education (2003). He is also co-editor of the online translation studies journal inTRAlinea and of the Translation Studies Abstracts Online database.