Text corpora and translator training

2006

Abstract This paper aims to chart some of the ground we have covered in the last decade or so in the area at the interface between corpus linguistics and translator training/translation practice, and to point to some of the challenges (and prospects) lying ahead.

2008

This article reviews the role currently played by corpora in translation teaching and practice. With regard to the former, classroom experiences involving corpusinformed approaches to translation teaching are discussed, and it is argued that such approaches should adopt an educational rather than a training attitude, giving more weight to awareness-raising uses of corpora, along with their obvious documentation roles.

Languages in the Globalised World: Interpreting Multilingual Literacy and Cross-Cultural Encounters. Special Issue of Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 2012

This article sets out to illustrate possible applications of electronic corpora in the translation classroom. Starting from a survey of corpus use within corpus-based translation studies, the didactic value of corpora in the translation classroom and their epistemic value in translation teaching and practice will be elaborated. A typology of translation practice-oriented corpora will be presented, and the use of corpora in translation will be positioned within two general models of translation competence. Special consideration will then be given to the design and application of so-called ‘Do-it-yourself (DIY) corpora’, which are compiled ad hoc with the aim of completing a specific translation task. In this context, possible sources for retrieving corpus texts will be presented and evaluated and it will be argued that – owing to time and availability constraints in real-life translation – the Internet should be used as a major source of corpus data. After a brief discussion of possible Internet research techniques for targeted and quality-focused corpus compilation, the possible use of the Internet itself as a ‘macro-corpus’ will be elaborated. The article concludes with a brief presentation of corpus use in translation teaching in the MA in Specialised Translation Programme offered at Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 2019

Corpus linguistics has surely secured its position and status in the world of science nowadays. Its role in linguistic research, and consequently its implications for the linguistic theory and practice are practically indisputable today. Nevertheless, what started capturing researchers' attention in the last decades is the role that corpus linguistics has in the domain of translation studies and training. In fact, corpus linguistics has extended its influence so much that it is safe to claim that providing proper training to trainee translators and doing translation in general is inconceivable and inadmissible without taking full advantage of the benefits of corpora. The paper aims to take a closer look at the current research done on the role of corpus linguistics in the sphere of translation studies and translation training by examining closely some of the most recent and relevant studies which have dealt with this issue recently. More specifically, the aim of the paper is to offer an overview of the most salient findings and results obtained from these studies, and eventually to draw conclusions as to how future translators could apply these insights into their practical work in order to secure their competitiveness in the global labour market.

International Journal of Language, Literacy and Translation, 2019

The institutional training of translators is a relatively new phenomenon beginning in the mid-twentieth century in the West and even later in countries like Iran. Despite the rapid development of Translation Studies in the late twentieth century, translator education did not receive the attention it deserved with trainee translators being trained unsystematically, basically through trial and error. It was only during the recent years that translation scholars and teachers gradually started to address the issue in a more efficient way. The present paper aims to elaborate on the potential of using language corpora in translation classrooms as a means to better help the trainee translators acquire the skills and competencies they need to enter the professional translation market. It further explains the potential of corpora as a resource for translation teachers. Finally, the article proposes a method to archive students' translations in the form of a parallel corpus and further elaborates on the benefits of using the respective corpus.

Ìnformacìjnì Tehnologì ì Zasobi Navčannâ, 2020

The anthropocosmic vector of modern Pedagogy and Linguistics requires development of such tools for future translators that enable as quick as possible processing of huge amounts of information with production of automatically determined frequencies, on the one hand. On the other hand, it demands minimization of the subjective influence of an individual researcher on the received results, giving a chance for detecting and analysing linguistic phenomena unnoticed earlier. Linguistic corpora are a state-of-the-art technology that can solve the outlined problem perfectly, for it opens a broad variety of practical and theoretical research options, and at the same time it is a didactic tool fulfilling purely didactic, cognitive, informative, formative, and testing / checking functions. Therefore, the use of linguistic corpora technology can be considered from two perspectives-learning to use corpora to translate and learning to translate using corpora. Corpora technology employment can enhance both objectivity and reliability of the results researchers obtain when processing language data, too. The application of corpus approach by translators-to-be gives an opportunity to study any language units in different speech genres in different types of discourse, as well as in various contexts in the corpus, without being hindered by the specificity of the studied linguistic unit. Translation students can search for discrete lexical / grammatical units, based on concordances, showing their functioning in different styles and areas of use. Moreover, parallel corpora provide ready solutions for the choice of translation models in certain conditions. The purpose of this article, stipulated by the relevance of the set problem, as well as the lack of ready parallel corpora in Ukraine, covers development of special methodological procedures and

Creativity and Innovation in Training English Language Professionals The idea of this volume of CTTL emerged in the ESSE10 (The European Society for the Study of English) conference in August 2010 in Turin, Italy, where the contributors gave papers in the seminar Creativity and Innovation in Training English Language Professionals. The convenors were Dr Anca Greere from Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai, Romania, Dr Mari Pakkala-Weckström from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Professor Viviana Gaballo from Università di Macerata, Italy. This seminar, in turn, was a continuation of an earlier seminar in the previous ESSE9 conference in 2008, in Aarhus, Denmark (the papers of this seminar are published in Viviana Gaballo (ed). 2009 English in Translation Studies: Methodological Perspectives. eum x Translation Studies). The call for papers for the 2010 seminar was as follows: The seminar invites contributions on topics related to curriculum development, syllabus compilation, methodological planning, materials development and pedagogical interaction tailored to higher education and continuous professional development training in the areas of the ever-growing language industry and its English language component. Language professions such as translator, terminologist, reviser, interpreter, subtitler, dubber etc. are making their way into the curriculum of many European programmes with English Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning Vol. IV 2 being omnipresent in the language combinations offered to trainees. To meet the demands of the market and the expectations of trainees without forfeiting academic, research oriented goals, such programmes frequently exhibit an innovative academic/vocational perspective in the variety of training methodologies applied. We welcome debates on methodologies in English specialized professional training displaying adaptability to professional profiles and respective professional competences. The seminar attracted seven papers dealing with several areas of the language industry and education. In the fruitful discussions following the papers, many differences but also similarities between the various programmes and institutions arose. Five of the papers presented at the seminar are published in the present volume. Clare Donovan (ESIT-Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) discusses the implications of the increasing use of English as a lingua franca for conference interpreter training in her contribution. She argues that interpreting is still much in demand for several different reasons: institutional, sociological, and political. The standard and quality of the service provided have increased, making greater demands on training institutions. Mike Garant and Juha Eskelinen’s article (University of Helsinki) presents a learner survey of a pilot project for teaching translation based on social constructivism. Ana María Martín Castillejos and María Paz Kindelán Echevarría (Technical University of Madrid – UPM) discuss the role of emotions in the cognitive process of the Spanish students of English at the School of Architecture in Madrid, and the importance of using transfers and code switching in the classroom as part of the process to create trust, essential to consolidate the language learning process in view of developing professional communication skills. In her contribution, Amanda Murphy (Catholic University in Milan) makes a case for the inclusion of modules on how to revise English texts in language programs that prepare students for the professional world, particularly for EU institutions. She presents the use of EuroCom, a parallel monolingual corpus of specialised texts provided by the Editing Unit of the Directorate General for Translation of the European Commission for developing skills in editing specialized texts for students studying International Management at the Catholic University in Milan. Finally, Mari Pakkala-Weckström (University of Helsinki) compares the working methods of two differently evaluated groups of students attending translation courses from English into Finnish at the University of Helsinki. The study strongly implies that the students who were evaluated on a continuous basis spent more time on their homework than those who were evaluated on the basis of an end-of term exam. After a double blind review process, selected papers were published in this volume. There is also a companion website located at: http://www.cttl.org. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the following individuals: the writers for submitting their contributions to a blind review process, because without their courage and effort an edited collection like this would not bepossible, and the members of the editorial review board for their thoughtful and timely reviews. I would also like to thank Anni Koho and Evelina Schmuckli for their editorial assistance and Dan Holt for his proofreading and typesetting. We hope the readers will find reading Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning both interesting and rewarding. Mikel Garant & Mari Pakkala-Weckström

1999

The article describes two translation technology modules available to MA students at UCL. These modules emphasise the following: combining theory and practice; preparation for the translation industry; use of the software in all practical translation work; teamwork; learning by doing and by participating in projects. They aim to cover a wide range of translation technology and technology-related topics, including terminology, translation memory, machine translation, term extraction, system evaluation, parallel text acquisition and statistical MT engine training. Overall, their goal is to produce versatile problem-solvers rather than software users dependent on a particular system.