Corpora in Translation

Studies
TKI-424 Çevırı Yöntemleri ve Uygulamaları III
Kurmanbekov Ilim
The idea of investigating translation and translating through
corpora was first put forward by Baker in 1993. At the time it was
envisaged that in this new partnership Corpus Linguistics would
provide the methodology for carrying out empirical investigations
while translation theory would identify the areas of enquiry and
elaborate operational hypotheses.

The two partners would work in harmony mainly for the benefit
of the advancement of the descriptive branch of the discipline.
Since then the partnership has acquired a clear identity with a
specific denomination, Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CTS).
Its areas of research range from descriptive to applied studies, and
concern many different languages. (Laviosa-Braithwaite, 1996).
What is Corpora?
The word corpus is used to describe a collection of
examples of language collected for linguistic study.
It can also describe collections of texts stored and
accessed electronically. (Hunston, 2002).
WHAT ARE CORPORA USED FOR?
• They give information about how a language works.
• Exploringcorpora can help students to observe nuances
of usage and to make comparisons between languages.
• Corporaare also used to investigate cultural attitudes
expressed through language
Corpora Studies in translation
• When it comes to the translation field, we can
consider parallel corpus and comparable corpus
as useful types of corpora. Parallel Corpus is the
study of the occurrences of linguistic hypothesis
between two or more languages.
USING CORPORA IN TRANSLATION
• Comparable corpora allow to compare the use of apparent equivalents.
• Parallel corpora allow to see how words and phrases have been translated in
the past.
• General corpora can be used to establish norm of frequency and usage.
Corpora in Translation research
• As a methodology, corpus linguistics provides the resources and tools
which allow researchers to investigate and discover regularities of
linguistics behavior across large bodies of translated texts, thus meeting
the requirement of grounding translation research in empirical evidence .
• Corpus‐based studies usually involve the comparison of two
(sub)corpora. Translated texts are compared with either their source texts
(parallel corpus) or with another (sub)corpus constructed according to
similar design criteria (comparable corpus), either in the same or in
another language.
• These corpora are used to investigate regularities of translated texts,
regularities of translators and regularities of languages in contrast.
Corpora in Translation research
• Baker (1993) proposed a tentative list of ‘universal features of translation’, that is
recurring linguistic patterns which distinguish translated from non ‐translated text.
• Baker suggested that features such as ‘simplification’, i.e. the tendency to “simplify
the language used in translation” (Baker 1996:181‐182), ‘explicitation’, i.e. the
tendency to “spell things out rather than leave them implicit” (ibid., p. 180),
‘normalization’, i.e. the tendency “to exaggerate features of the target language and to
conform to its typical patterns” (ibid:183), and ‘levelling out’, i.e. the tendency “of
translated text to gravitate towards the centre of a continuum” (ibid.:184) could be
uncovered by comparing a subcorpus of translated texts with a subcorpus of non‐
translated texts in the same language.
Corpora in Translation research
• Baker’s research program was very suggestive, and inspired various projects which set
out to test the existence of translation universals.
• Laviosa investigated the simplification hypothesis by building and analyzing the English
Comparable Corpus (ECC), created by putting together the Translational English Corpus
(TEC), a multi‐source‐language corpus made up of translational narrative and newspaper
texts, and a comparable corpus compiled with texts extracted from the British National
Corpus (BNC).
• She identified four core patterns of lexical simplification in translated texts, which taken
together appeared to “support the general descriptive hypothesis that, independently of
source language and text type, translators working into English as their mother tongue
tend to restrict the range of words available to them and use a relatively higher
proportion of high‐frequency lexical items.” (Laviosa 2008a:123).
Corpora in Translation research
• Studies have investigated syntactic as well as lexical features, and the
methodology has involved comparison of word count statistics as well as
manual analysis of concordance lines in search of patterns of use of
specific (groups of) lexical items or syntactic structures.
• Comparable monolingual corpora have been created and translation
universals have been tested for languages like, among others, Finnish,
Spanish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Chinese.
• Other corpus types, including parallel corpora of source and target texts,
and comparable corpora in either or both the source and/or target language
have been used to investigate hypothesized universals not only from a
target but also from a source perspective (Chesterman 2004), suggesting
that comparable and parallel corpora may offer complementary
perspectives on translation norms and universals (Bernardini 2011).
Corpora in Translation research
• A second, important strand of corpus ‐based translation research has concerned
translator style, understood as coherent and motivated patterns of choice
“recognizable across a range of translations by the same translator”, which
“distinguish that translator’s work from that of other translators” and which
“cannot be explained as directly reproducing the source text’s style or as the
inevitable result of linguistic constraints” (Saldanha 2011:240).
• Consistent patterns of linguistic behavior may be the result of conscious or
unconscious selections between multiple options, and can be related to the
cultural and ideological context in which translators operate, as well as to more
personal stylistic choices (Baker 2000, Munday 2008).
Corpora in Translation research
• Several studies have compared different translations of the same source
(literary) text by two or more different translators.
• For instance, Bosseaux (2007) investigates how translators manifest their
discursive presence (‘voice’) in two French translations of Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves by looking at the use of personal pronouns, time and space
adverbials and verb tense.
• Winters (2009) studies modal particles and speech ‐act reporting verbs in two
different German translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and
Damned.
Corporaintranslation practice
• Corpus‐based applications are central to the education of perspective language
services providers, including future professional translators, who need to train
in the skills and acquire the know ‐how which characterize the profession,
including expertise in the use of tools such as translation memories and corpus
analysis software.
• Applications of corpus linguistics to language and translation teaching may
involve the development of corpus‐based materials, the compilation of corpora
for educational purposes, or the direct use of corpora in the classroom (Aston
et al. 2004). The latter area has developed mostly within the Data Driven
Learning (DDL) approach (Johns & King 1991), whereas students are
encouraged to analyze corpus data in order to test hypothesis and draw
conclusions about language, usually under the guidance of the teacher.
 Corpora in translation practice
• Various types of corpus‐based activities have been applied to the context of the translation. They
can precede, follow or be concurrent with a translation activity. In absence of a text to be
translated corpus‐based activities can be carried out to raise awareness of linguistic and cultural
elements which characterize source and/or target texts, while after a text has been translated they
can be used for revision and error correction purposes.
• Corpora used in vocational translation courses include large, general and balanced monolingual
corpora such as the BNC for English, small and specialized target language corpora, bilingual
comparable corpora and parallel corpora.
• Educational materials created specifically for and by translation learners include online courses
to teach the use of corpus resources and methods, and translation learner corpora. Like other
corpora used in translation research they can contain only translations or both translations and
source texts. They can be bi‐ or multilingual and include one or more translation directions, and
can be annotated with explicit linguistic annotation as well as according to an error typology.
Corpora in the translation profession
• Most translators ‐ whether free ‐lance or employed in a translation agency, and
regardless of whether they are translating technical manuals, advertising copy
or novels ‐ make use of computers. Translations are produced as electronic
texts, while source texts are also usually available in that format.
• Thus, much translation work is carried out in a computer‐assisted translation
(CAT) environment, which may vary from a standard desktop equipped with
word processing software and a browser to a full ‐blown translator workstation
consisting of a multiplicity of tools specifically created for translators of
technical texts and localizers
 Corpora in the translation profession
• Translation memory software is certainly the tool which has mostly contributed to change the
way in which the profession is carried out and to create a new work profile, which involves
specific skills and knowledge.
• The concept behind translation memory software, which may range from sophisticated
commercial suites to basic freeware applications, is that of re‐using segments of past translations ,
thus saving time and increasing accuracy and productivity.
• At purchase a translation memory system is an empty shell which is filled up with a growing and
dynamic ‘memory’ as translators save their translations together with the source texts in paired
segments called translation units (TUs).
• With time, the translation memory database becomes a sort of parallel corpus, and when a new
sentence to be translated matches a previously translated segment, the system brings up the
previous translation.
Corpora in the translation profession
• Finally, proficiency in corpus linguistics skills and procedures has become an
indispensable part of the translator’s professional competence.
• Translators can resort to monolingual and bilingual corpora and corpus
analysis software to find information about terms, phraseology and textual
patterns in both source and target languages, and to parallel corpora for finding
solutions to previously solved translation problems.
• Large, general monolingual corpora are now available for many languages, and
translators can create their own small corpora from the Web by downloading
and processing documents retrieved using search engines and compiled
through semi‐automatic routines implemented by ad hoc programs and online
services.
Conclusion
• Information and communication technologies have considerably impinged on
the way texts, including translated texts, are produced, disseminated and
consumed and on the way language services providers, including translators,
carry out their work.
• Corpora have had a significant influence on current developments in machine
(assisted) translation as well as in translation research and practice.
• They have provided Internet users with a technology which is increasingly
used in computer‐mediated interlinguistic communication, and translation
professionals and scholars with tools and data which can be used to aid in the
translation process or to substantiate theoretical and descriptive claims.
Reference
• Zanettin, F. (2014) “Corpora in Translation”
• Laviousa , S. (2004)
Corpus-based translation studies: Where does it come from? Where is it going?
• Zanettin, F. (2009) ‘Corpus‐based Translation Activities for Language Learners’ The
Interpreter and Translator Trainer’.
• Baker, M. (1993) ‘Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and
Applications’
• Baker, M. (1996) ‘Corpus‐based Translation Studies – the Challenges that Lie ahead’
• Zanettin, F. (2012) Translation‐Driven Corpora. Corpus Resources in Descriptive and
Applied Translation Studies.
• Zanettin, F., S. Bernardini and D. Stewart (eds) (2003) Corpora in Translator Education
• Winters, M. (2009) ‘Modal Particles Explained. How Modal Particles Creep into
Translations and Reveal Translators’ Styles’ Target