Corpora In Interpreting Studies

Written by Maeve Olohan, a leading name in the field, and offering a comprehensive account of the use of corpora by today's translators and researchers, this book is the definitive guide to a fast-developing area of study.

Cheung, Liu, Moratto, and their contributors examine how corpora can be effectively harnessed to benefit interpreting practice and research in East Asian settings. In comparison to the achievements made in the field of corpus- based translation studies, the use of corpora in interpreting is not comparable in terms of scope, methods, and agenda. One of the predicaments that hampers this line of inquiry is the lack of systematic corpora to document spoken language. This issue is even more pronounced when dealing with East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which are typologically different from European languages. As language plays a pivotal role in interpreting research, the use of corpora in interpreting within East Asian contexts has its own distinct characteristics as well as methodological constraints and concerns. However, it also generates new insights and findings that can significantly advance this research field. A valuable resource for scholars of scholars focusing on corpus interpreting, particularly those dealing with East Asian languages.

This book presents a collection of state-of-the-art work in corpus-based interpreting studies, highlighting international research on the properties of interpreted speech, based on naturalistic interpreting data. Interpreting research has long been hampered by the lack of naturalistic data that would allow researchers to make empirically valid generalizations about interpreting. The researchers who present their work here have played a pioneering role in the compilation of interpreting data and in the exploitation of that data. The collection focuses on both of these aspects, including a detailed overview of interpreting corpora, a collective paper on the way forward in corpus compilation and several studies on interpreted speech in diverse language pairs and interpreter-mediated settings, based on existing corpora.

The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices draws on a wide array of case studies from all over the world to demonstrate the value of different forms of translation - written, oral, audiovisual - as social practices that are essential to achieve sustainability, accessibility, inclusion, multiculturalism, and multilingualism. Edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, this timely collection illustrates the interactions between translation studies and thesocial and natural sciences, reformulating the scope of this discipline as a socially-oriented, empirical, and ethical research field in the 21st century.

The book addresses different areas of corpus-based translation studies, including corpus-based study of translation features, translator’s style, norms of translation, translation practice, translator training and interpreting. It begins by tracing the development of corpus-based translation studies and introducing the compilation of different types of corpora for translation research. The use of corpora in different research areas is then discussed in detail, and the implications and limitations of corpus-based translation studies are addressed. Featuring the use of figures, tables, illustrations and case studies, as well as discussion of methodological issues, the book offers a practical guide to corpus-based translation. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and professionals who are interested in translation studies, interpreting studies or computer-aided translation.

This volume assesses the state of the art of parallel corpus research as a whole, reporting on advances in both recent developments of parallel corpora – with some particular references to comparable corpora as well– and in ways of exploiting them for a variety of purposes. The first part of the book is devoted to new roles that parallel corpora can and should assume in translation studies and in contrastive linguistics, to the usefulness and usability of parallel corpora, and to advances in parallel corpus alignment, annotation and retrieval. There follows an up-to-date presentation of a number of parallel corpus projects currently being carried out in Europe, some of them multimodal, with certain chapters illustrating case studies developed on the basis of the corpora at hand. In most of these chapters, attention is paid to specific technical issues of corpus building. The third part of the book reflects on specific applications and on the creation of bilingual resources from parallel corpora. This volume will be welcomed by scholars, postgraduate and PhD students in the fields of contrastive linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, language teaching and learning, machine translation, and natural language processing.

Corpus-based translation studies has become a major paradigm and research methodology and has investigated a wide variety of topics in the last two decades. The contributions to this volume add to the range of corpus-based studies by providing examples of some less explored applications of corpus analysis methods to translation research. They show that the area keeps evolving as it constantly opens up to different frameworks and approaches, from appraisal theory to process-oriented analysis, and encompasses multiple translation settings, including (indirect) literary translation, machine (assisted)-translation and the practical work of professional legal translators. The studies included in the volume also expand the range of application of corpus applications in terms of the tools used to accomplish the research tasks outlined.

Corpus-based contrastive and translation research are areas that keep evolving in the digital age, as the range of new corpus resources and tools expands, opening up to different approaches and application contexts. The current book contains a selection of papers which focus on corpora and translation research in the digital age, outlining some recent advances and explorations. After an introductory chapter which outlines language technologies applied to translation and interpreting with a view to identifying challenges and research opportunities, the first part of the book is devoted to current advances in the creation of new parallel corpora for under-researched areas, the development of tools to manage parallel corpora or as an alternative to parallel corpora, and new methodologies to improve existing translation memory systems. The contributions in the second part of the book address a number of cutting-edge linguistic issues in the area of contrastive discourse studies and translation analysis on the basis of comparable and parallel corpora in several languages such as English, German, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish, thus showcasing the richness of the linguistic diversity carried out in these recent investigations. Given the multiplicity of topics, methodologies and languages studied in the different chapters, the book will be of interest to a wide audience working in the fields of translation studies, contrastive linguistics and the automatic processing of language.