Introducing Corpora In Translation 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.

The use of corpora in translation studies, both as a tool for translators and as a way of analyzing the process of translation, is growing. This book provides a much-needed assessment of how the analysis of corpus data can make a contribution to the study of translation. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies: traces the development of corpus methods within translation studies defines the types of corpora used for translation research, discussing their design and application and presenting tools for extracting and analyzing data examines research potential and methodological limitatis considers some uses of corpora by translators and in translator training features research questions, case studies and discussion points to provide a practical guide to using corpora in translation studies. Offering a comprehensive account of the use of corpora by today's translators and researchers, Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies is the definitive guide to a fast-developing area of study.

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.

Corpora are among the hottest issues in translation studies affecting both pure and applied realms of the discipline. As for pure translation studies, corpora have done their part through contributions to the studies on translational language and translation universals. Yet, their recent contribution is within the borders of applied translation studies, i.e. translator training and translation aids. The former is the major focus of the present book. The present book in fact aims at providing readers with comprehensive information about corpora in translation studies in general, and corpora in translator education in particular. It further offers researchers and practitioners a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of studies done on corpora in translator education and provides a rich source of information on pros and cons of using different types of corpora as translation aids in the context of translation classrooms.

In the course of the last 10 years corpus-based studies of translation have given rise to a sizeable and coherent body of research within Pure and Applied Translation Studies. In view of these developments, it is important to assess the state of the art of Corpus-based Translation Studies and attempt to identify some of the main trends that are likely to characterise its expansion. The aim of this volume is to examine and evaluate the main ideas, methods of analysis, findings, and pedagogical applications of this relatively young and promising field of research. Translator trainees and teachers of translation, professional translators, young researchers, and scholars in Translation Studies will find the principles, the methodology, the discoveries, and the practical applications of corpus-based research useful and inspiring. They are useful in as far as they equip translation practitioners with tools and techniques that can truly improve the quality and efficiency of their work. They are inspiring because they reveal facts of the process and product of translation which are new, consistent, and based on solid empirical foundations.

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 an accompanying DVD. 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.

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 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.