Corpora for Translators and Presentation of ASSIST
A recent survey of ITI translators shows that the majority of translators are not aware of the potential offered by corpora (large text collections with a specialised search interface), or even about the very existence of corpora for their languages. Moreover, only a minority of those aware about corpora actively use them in their daily practice. At the same time corpora offer a useful window into standard ways of wording expressions in the source and target languages. In this sense, the utility of corpora complements dictionaries and translation memories. Unlike dictionaries, corpora list expressions in their context. Unlike translation memories, corpora are very large repositories (frequently hundreds of millions of words), which contain information for a variety of word uses. Dictionaries and translation memories can miss many multiword expressions, such as strong feeling or daunting experience, as well as terms describing more recent developments in a given field, whereas suitable corpora will usually contain them.
In this workshop we will focus on two topics. The first is to discuss the use of corpora in three domains of translation practice:
- to explore text types and genres in the source and target languages
- to understand problematic expressions in a source text
- to produce appropriate wordings in the target language
The second topic is a presentation of ASSIST, a corpus-based tool that has been recently developed at the Centre for Translation Studies in Leeds. The tool suggests translation equivalents for words and expressions from the general lexicon, if they are missing from or inadequately represented in existing dictionaries. The current tool works between English and Russian, however, we will present a similar study for French, German and Chinese.
Workshop organisers are: Bogdan Babych, Jeremy Munday, Serge Sharoff, Tony Hartley.