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

Chapter 5. The real use of corpora in teaching and research contexts 85(2006), some are more relevant for TS and others for CL; however, in both typesof research, some kind of comparison between languages is implied. As noted byGranger, comparison between corpora of original texts in different languages isthe most important domain of CL, whereas the comparison of translated textsin different languages is the preference of TS. There is however a quite wide domainintersection between both disciplines, related to their objectives, that makesit difficult clearly to distinguish between both. In other words, researchers in bothfields are equally interested in parallel and comparable corpora for their studies;the distinctive point probably lies in the objectives pursued: the objective for CL isto detect differences and similarities between languages whereas the final objectivefor TS is to capture the features of translation (as process and as result). We willnow refer to some examples of cross-linguistic research types based on corpora:– Cross-linguistic studies between translated and non-translated language focusingon features of translationese on the basis of the universals hypothesisedby Baker (1993) that include simplification, explicitation, normalisation andconcretisation (e.g., Puurtinen 2006), or focusing on features induced by thesource language. For such studies a comparable annotated corpus is desired.– Contrastive studies investigating expressions of a certain concept or semanticfield in two different languages (e.g., Löken 1997) by means of aparallel corpus.– Studies of comparison and translation of fixed expressions between two languages.For instance, Charteris-Black, J. (2003) proposes establishing a modelfor the comparison and translation of English and Malay idioms to facilitatethe translator’s task.– Studies comparing the translation of events of a certain semantic field betweenlanguages. An interesting study could be made by comparing verbs whichexpress noise by translations from a Germanic into a Romance language.– Comparison between the tense system in two languages and how the differencesare overcome in translated texts. For instance, Chuquet, H. (2003)studies how the French imparfait is rendered in English texts through aspectualor modal additions and showing some common features between Frenchimparfait and English past tense.– Comparison between the voice system in two languages. Davidse, K. & L.Heyvaert (2003) compare, for instance, the middle formation in English andDutch. Other interesting studies could involve comparison of the use of thepassive voice in Germanic and Romance languages.So far, we have exemplified some of the multiple exploitation possibilities and thebenefits of having at one’s disposal a uniform user-friendly interface to access differenttypes of corpora in translation training contexts. Platforms providing accessto corpora for translation training should allow access to the following types of