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

60 Belinda Maiabeen translated by machine translation programmes and are hardly a resource fortranslation or terminology work.Besides these problems, many people, and particularly experts writing articlesat the cutting-edge of their research, increasingly want and need to be read in Englishand the original in their own language is either unavailable or non-existent,since so many write directly in English. Textbooks, usually rich in terminology,are not translated from the original English in which they were written, with theexcuse that students should be encouraged to read and write English.Comparable corpora, or texts in the same domain or in a similar genre, haveseveral advantages over parallel ones. They are more available, and there is a greaterchance that the text will probably be representative of the conventions of style andregister that are acceptable in the local context. Also, if they are by experts writingin their own language, the terminology will be more acceptable than that chosenby a translator. Even so, it is usually difficult to balance the corpora in both or allthe languages involved, especially if one of them is English.A point often made when building specialised corpora is that collections of‘raw’ text are not ‘corpora’, i.e., that for collections of text to become corpora theymust be properly annotated for parts-of-speech, syntax or other purposes. Experienceof working with both types of expert tells us that there is a basic lack ofagreement here between the linguists, who want to study language in its multipleaspects, and the computer engineers who want to accelerate the extraction of varioustypes of information from enormous quantities of text for which it would beunreasonable – if not impossible – to demand annotation.There are arguments for both sides, and one of them depends on the answerto the question ‘what is the ideal size of a specialised corpus?’ The linguist willprobably argue that quality is more important than quantity, and that 100,000words of well-selected texts can provide better information than a million wordsof poorly selected texts. The computer engineer will want to extract patterns ofinformation from enormous quantities of raw text, in an attempt to create toolsthat solve the problems posed by the giant ‘corpus’ that is the Internet. In betweenthere is the computational linguist trying to construct the treebanks (see, forexample, Hansen-Schirra’s Chapter Two) and electronic dictionaries that, from alonger term perspective, are supposed help everybody by accelerating the linguisticanalysis of vast quantities of text.3. Corpora and terminology researchTerminology management skills are increasingly necessary for professional translatorsand translation companies, yet courses in terminology have only been considereda necessary part of translation curricula relatively recently. While in the