Corpora in Translation Practice
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey
The use of corpora is no longer restricted to a small community of researchers. Anyone with an internet connection is now able to access corpora to help them with everyday questions about language, including questions which neither more traditional resources like dictionaries and grammars nor search engines or even native speakers and our own colleagues can always help us with. Translators are among those who have much to gain from using corpora, as widely acknowledged in the literature. In this talk, I shall demonstrate how corpora can help translators in everyday translation practice, using examples from easily accessible corpora, including the Sketch Engine (Kilgariff et al. 2004), a leading corpus tool with readily usable corpora for sixty languages, which also allows translators to compile their own DIY, specialized language corpora for terminology extraction. I will also discuss some of the challenges of training translators to use corpora and give examples of queries carried out by trainee translators.
Kilgarriff, A., P. Rychlý, P. Smrz and D. Tugwell 2004. ‘The Sketch Engine’. Proceedings of Euralex. Lorient, France, 105-116.
About the speaker
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Programme Director of the MA Translation at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on applied uses of corpora in language learning, lexicography and translation. She was principal investigator of the open-access COMPARA bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese fiction and chief editor of the Oxford Portuguese Dictionary, a corpus-based Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese two-way bilingual dictionary with over 200,000 words (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her work has been published in several international, peer-reviewed books and journals, and she is a member of the programme committee of the Corpus Use and Learning to Translate (CULT), the Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC) and the Corpus Linguisticsconference series. Before coming to the UK in 2013, she lived for many years in Portugal, teaching at Universidade Europeia and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and working as an external translator for the European Parliament.
New Directions in Corpus Design, Tools Development, and Researcher Interaction
Professor Laurence Anthony
Center for English Language Education, Waseda University, Japan
Honorary Research Fellow, Lancaster University, UK.
In this talk, I will first discuss recent changes in the nature of corpus linguistics research, focusing on corpus size and design issues, the growing use of web-based corpus analyses, and new avenues for corpus research including social network analysis. Next, I will introduce a range of newly developed freeware desktop and web-based parallel corpus tools that assist corpus linguists in the collection, cleaning, and standardization of new corpora, as well as the analysis and visualization of results from corpus studies in these new areas. At the end of the talk, I will discuss the importance of cross-discipline researcher interaction and show how it can facilitate not only the development of new corpus research tools, but also new areas of corpus research inquiry.
About the speaker
Laurence Anthony is Professor of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Japan. He has a BSc degree (Mathematical Physics) from the University of Manchester, UK, and MA (TESL/TEFL) and PhD (Applied Linguistics) degrees from the University of Birmingham, UK. He is a former Director and current Technical English Program Coordinator at the Center for English Language Education (CELESE), Waseda University. His main interests are in corpus linguistics tools development and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) program design and teaching methodologies. He received the National Prize of the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies (JAECS) in 2012 for his work in corpus software tools design. He is the developer of several corpus tools including AntConc, AntWordProfiler, AntMover, SarAnt, TagAnt, andVariAnt.
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