Papers by Giorgina Cerutti
International Journal of Legal Discourse
Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale... more Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale research has empirically explored the difficulty of terminology in translating legal genres. Approaches to translation difficulty in translation studies more broadly remain limited in scope. To fill this gap, a study was conducted to measure the difficulty associated with the translation of legal terminology and phraseology, as well as with terminology of other domains, in the LETRINT 1+ corpus, including nine representative genres of three institutional settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). For comparative purposes, four levels of translation difficulty were assigned to multiple terminological features by a group of specialized translators through a consensus-building process of annotation based on the cognitive effort estimated for translation decision-making. The difficulty scores obtained confirm the correlation between legal singularity...
Translation Spaces. A multidisciplinary, multimedia, and multilingual journal of translation
Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring co... more Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results. This is especially true when the target population of texts under examination is very large and transcends a restricted area of specialization and/or covers multiple genres, as in the case of texts translated in institutional settings. This paper describes the multilayered sequential approach to corpus building applied in a comparative study on legal translation in three of these settings. The approach is based on a full mapping and categorization of institutional texts from a legal perspective; it applies an innovative combination of stratified sampling techniques integrating quantitative and qualitative criteria adapted to the research aims. The resulting corpora, categorization matrix and selection records, together with the methodological detail provided, can be useful for building other ...
Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring co... more Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results. This is especially true when the target population of texts under examination is very large and transcends a restricted area of specialization and/or covers multiple genres, as in the case of texts translated in institutional settings. This paper describes the multilayered sequential approach to corpus building applied in a comparative study on legal translation in three of these settings. The approach is based on a full mapping and categorization of institutional texts from a legal perspective; it applies an innovative combination of stratified sampling techniques integrating quantitative and qualitative criteria adapted to the research aims. The resulting corpora, categorization matrix and selection records, together with the methodological detail provided, can be useful for building other multi-genre corpora in translation studies and further afield.
The corpus-based analysis of legal discursive features is key for research on legal translation, ... more The corpus-based analysis of legal discursive features is key for research on legal translation, as well as other related fields, such as comparative legal linguistics, legal lexicography and legal linguistics. This chapter addresses methodological considerations relevant to the selection of tools to analyse legal discourses for legal translation research purposes. The results of a comparative analysis of currently available fourth-generation concordancers – CPQweb, Sketch Engine, and ParaVoz – are presented with a view to verifying their suitability for a specific research project, according to the project's context of use. These tools are tested in accordance with the relevant guidelines and norms designed for software evaluation.
Conference Presentations by Giorgina Cerutti
We will explore the possibility of shifting from a do-it-yourself (DIY) towards a do-it-together ... more We will explore the possibility of shifting from a do-it-yourself (DIY) towards a do-it-together (DIT) approach in corpus creation, as well as in the way translators use and share sources, resources and tools. Building on previous research on current trends and future perspectives in translation aids, we suggest moving towards collaboration by means of a one-stop DIT site aimed not only at corpus creation, design and analysis, but also at sharing translation aids. In order to test this approach, we have defined and analyzed a specific translation scenario—that of Uruguayan English-Spanish certified translators—and a translation brief. We have anticipated some of the problems our end users could encounter when translating, and looked for solutions and different translation options using a corpus-based approach. Testing the usefulness and feasibility of this approach for legal translation has, in turn, helped us predict if our end users would be interested in creating DIT corpora and participating in a collaborative site in the future. Even though we have not been able to fully test this approach, the perspectives are quite optimistic and future lines of research are suggested.
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Papers by Giorgina Cerutti
Conference Presentations by Giorgina Cerutti