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Topics in Language Resources for Translation ... - ymerleksi - home

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92 Rachélle Gautonneeded by the Bantu language translator on a daily basis. There are woefully fewtechnical dictionaries and term<strong>in</strong>ology lists and/or glossaries available <strong>in</strong> any of theofficial SA Bantu languages, and this coupled with the lack of guidance regard<strong>in</strong>gwhich terms should be regarded as standard as well as regard<strong>in</strong>g term <strong>for</strong>mationstrategies, puts translators work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>to the SA Bantu languages <strong>in</strong> the unenviableposition of hav<strong>in</strong>g to create term<strong>in</strong>ology when undertak<strong>in</strong>g almost any translationtask, and not only technical translations. Under these sets of circumstances, thetranslator ends up work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> isolation, as there are usually no standard guidel<strong>in</strong>eswhich can be followed or authoritative sources that can be consulted. Eachtranslator thus effectively ends up creat<strong>in</strong>g his or her own term<strong>in</strong>ology – on thefly,sotospeak.Another drawback of this situation is that translators work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>to the SABantu languages, often do not document their term<strong>in</strong>ology <strong>for</strong> future re-use,ma<strong>in</strong>ly because these translators are not familiar with, and/or tra<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong> the useof, the various electronic tools on offer that could assist them <strong>in</strong> this task. Furthermore,no easily accessible mechanism exists <strong>in</strong> South Africa yet that would allowtranslators to pool their resources, although various discussions have taken placetowards creat<strong>in</strong>g such mechanisms. Should translators be able to share their resources,this would also go some way towards open<strong>in</strong>g up a dialogue regard<strong>in</strong>gthe term<strong>in</strong>ology used <strong>in</strong> various doma<strong>in</strong>s and could even result <strong>in</strong> achiev<strong>in</strong>g some<strong>for</strong>m of term<strong>in</strong>ology standardisation, even though this would not be an officiallysanctioned standardisation process.Despite the lack of standardised term<strong>in</strong>ologies, translation and localisation<strong>in</strong>to the SA Bantu languages and Afrikaans are proceed<strong>in</strong>g apace. As Kruger(2004:2) po<strong>in</strong>ts out:In South Africa, translation and <strong>in</strong>terpret<strong>in</strong>g are the ma<strong>in</strong> areas <strong>in</strong> which thetechnical registers of African languages and Afrikaans are be<strong>in</strong>g developed andstandardised[...].The <strong>in</strong>crease <strong>in</strong> the availability of target texts <strong>in</strong> the official SA languages, particularlyon the Web, creates the ideal opportunity to use these resources <strong>in</strong> translatortra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g. This will be the topic of the next section where translator tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g at theUniversity of Pretoria will be presented as a case study.3. The use of corpora <strong>in</strong> translator tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g at the University of Pretoria:AcasestudyIn 2000, translator tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g at the University of Pretoria was <strong>in</strong>troduced at undergraduateas well as at postgraduate levels, and <strong>in</strong> 2004 a number of postgraduatemodulesontheapplicationofHuman<strong>Language</strong>Technology(HLT)<strong>in</strong>transla-

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