thecorpusanalysistool–anunder-exploitedtranslationaid.docVIP

The corpus analysis tool – an under-exploited translation aid Despite the fact that corpus analysis tools are widely used by researchers in the fields of linguistics and translation studies, they seem to be neglected by practising translators. Michael Wilkinson looks at the reasons for this and provides a glimpse at how translators can exploit these tools, especially when translating specialized texts into a foreign language. Q1) Are you a practising translator? Q2) Are you familiar with corpus analysis tools? Q3) Do you use corpus analysis tools in your work? I would hazard a guess that amongst those of you who answered “yes” to Q1, the majority answered “no” to Q2 and Q3. I would also hazard a guess that if translation studies researchers were asked the same questions, the proportion of “yes” answers would be relatively high. Corpus analysis tools have for many years been widely used by researchers to examine electronic corpora of original and translated text, and the results of this research have shed valuable light on both the translation product and the translation process. An excellent overview of corpus-based translation research is provided by Olohan (2004). Corpus analysis tools allow you to access, display and investigate the information contained within a corpus – a large collection of texts, usually in plain text format – in a variety of ways. Corpus analysis packages often comprise a variety of tools. Probably the most useful of these from the translator’s point of view is the concordancer, which will find all the occurrences of a search word, or search pattern, and display them in the centre of your screen, together with a span of co-text to the left and right, as shown in Figure 1. The display shown in Figure 1 is known as a Key Word in Context (KWIC). Figure 1: Some of the 36 concordance lines generated by WordSmith Tools for the search pattern panorama* using a 670,000-word corpus of tourist brochure texts You can manipulate the KWIC