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

Chapter 3. Corpora for translator education and translation practice 45lation technology. 1 The survey aimed to collect information about the use translatorsmake of the Web, their attitude to e-learning, and their awareness and use ofcorpora. Following two rounds of submissions in 2005 and 2006 – both online andon paper, mostly through translators’ associations and communities – 741 questionnaireswere completed by professional translators from the UK (the majority),France, Germany and Italy. 2In order to clarify what was meant by “corpora” and maximise the chances ofreceiving relevant answers, the corpus section of the questionnaire (summarisedin Table 3) started with a concise and simplified definition. 3 This turned out tobe essential, considering that 42% of the respondents reported never having heardabout corpora. Initial questions were meant to point out the difference betweenusing “reference materials” and using “corpora”. Out of the total professional respondents,45.7% reported collecting reference materials, more than half of themspecified that they collect texts in electronic format (69.1% of those who reportedcollecting materials) and 49.2% of the latter declared that they read these texts(rather than searching through them). A slightly smaller percentage of respondents(44.2%) reported consulting corpora in their translation practice, the majorityusing facilities in word processors (65.7%) to search through them, with only a minorityusing a concordancer (17.7%). While many translators are not acquaintedwith corpora, or report not having the time and skills to use them, there seemsto be widespread interest in learning more about them: 79.7% of respondentswould be interested in a service which provides domain specific corpora, 80.0%in a tool for extracting terms from corpora, and 83.7% in learning more abouttheir potential (MeLLANGE 2006).Two main conclusions can be drawn from these data. First, there is a needfor tailor-made learning materials addressed to translation professionals, whichhighlight the value added of corpora with respect to other tools and resources,and which adopt a practical (and not uncritical) perspective. Section 4 takes up1. More information about MeLLANGE as well as the full survey results are available fromhttp://mellange.eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr/2. Overall, 1,015 questionnaires were returned, including those filled in by students of translationin the same countries. Here only the professionals’ questionnaires are discussed, though.3. The definition provided was: “Corpora are collections of texts in electronic form, usuallygrouped according to topic or type – contract, business letter, etc. Corpora may contain originaltexts in one language, comparable originals in two languages (comparable corpora), or originalsand their translations (parallel corpora). Translation Memories are a special kind of parallel corpora.Corpora may be large and general, or small and specialised. They are (usually) not readcover to cover, so to speak, but searched through software programs (usually called “concordancers”or “corpus analysers”). One can list all the words contained in the corpus and see theirfrequencies, search for a word or expression (in context) and find out its typical patterns”.