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

52 Silvia Bernardini and Sara Castagnoli5.2 ...andthefutureWhile the new tools at our disposal make the construction of corpora fromthe Web easier, certain obstacles still have to be overcome. In the long term,widespread use of corpora and corpus construction and search facilities amongtranslators is likely to depend on their integration with Computer-Aided Translation(CAT) technology. We could envisage a tool that interacted with a web searchengine to search, retrieve and morphologically annotate corpora based on userspecifications. It would support regular expressions and handle subcorpora, andwould provide facilities for monolingual and parallel concordancing (includingalignment). Such a tool would extend the productivity of CAT systems by allowinga double search mode: automatic search for full and fuzzy matches in goldstandard TMs, and manual concordancing of comparable and parallel texts forhypothesis development and testing where the TM has nothing to contribute:[...] translators working with texts that contain a large number of repeated segments,such as revisions, will be well served by the segment processing approach.On the other hand, translators who hope to leverage or recycle information fromprevious translations that are from the same subject field, but that are not revisions,may find that the bilingual concordancing approach is more productive.(Bowker 2002:124)Such a system would also arguably limit some of the drawbacks associated with theuse of TMs. For instance, it has been observed (e.g., by Kenny 1999 and Bowker2002) that translators using CAT software may develop a tendency to make theirtexts more easily recyclable within a TM, regardless of the translation brief, andthat they may be led to lose sight of the notion of “text” as a consequence of a rigidsubdivision into units. The possibility to search whole texts (rather than translationunits) using a concordancer could positively impact on these strategies andattitudes.While no tool currently combines all these functionalities, some form of integrationseems to be underway, thanks to tools such as MultiTrans,aCATpackagewhich allows one to search for strings of any length (i.e., not limited to the size of atranslation unit), and, if required, displays them in full-text context. Interestingly,while the company producing this software is called MultiCorpora, nofurthermention of the words corpus and corpora can be found on the MultiTrans page: 8 afurther proof that these are currently not buzzwords in the translation market?8. http://www.multicorpora.ca/