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

Chapter 2. Interactive reference grammars 35Example (14) shows a German nominal phrase where the nominal head is deleted.In the English original a substitution is used to express the same meaning. Sincesubstitution does not work for German (see above), deletion seems to be anotherstrategy to translate this structure. In example (15), we find two Germanverbs (danken (thank) andtun (do)), the second subject is, however, deleted. Inthe English original the subject we is repeated for the second verb. The samephenomenon can be observed in example (16): The English original repeats thewords the way we, which are deleted in the German translation. In both examples,German is more elliptical expressing the cohesive links implicitly, whereasEnglish uses repetitions expressing the lexical cohesion more explicitly. These concordancesshow that the English-German corpus can also be used inversely helpingtranslators to find compensations for German constructions which do not existin English.4. Concluding remarks and outlookThe need for linguistically annotated corpora is observed across all branches oflinguistics, and the translation branch is no exception. There are certainly researchquestions which do not require such a detailed linguistic analysis, but which canbe resolved using unannotated data or automatic annotation without the burdenof constructing a big and complex language resource in advance. However, translationproblems resulting from the specificity of a language or a register need amore detailed linguistic analysis in order to be answered.In this chapter, we have suggested that monolingual and multilingual treebankscan assume the role of grammatical reference works for translation trainingand practice. In order for corpora to serve this purpose, they need to be enrichedwith linguistic information (Section 2). We have discussed the notions ofmonolingual and parallel treebanking and introduced some of the most importanttreebanks. In Section 3, we have shown that linguistic annotation can makea corpus a valuable resource for dealing with some typical translation problems.Offering the possibility to search for grammatical constructions (such as word ordervariation, clefting, raising constructions as well as substitutions and deletions)these treebanks are a much more powerful resource compared to parallel corporaof raw texts. And contrasting them to usual (printed) reference grammars, theconcordances generated on the basis of the treebanks are far more comprehensiveand exhaustive. Thus, the CroCo Corpus as well as the Penn and TiGer Treebanksprove to provide a wealth of information for the translation of typologicallanguage problems.Besides typologically motivated translation solutions, also examples for registerspecificlanguage use and their appropriate translations (i.e., register-specific