Using Corpora in Translation Studies Research - The ：翻译研究中使用语料库研究.pptVIP

15/11/2007 Using Corpora in Translation Studies Research Dorothy Kenny SALIS/Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University Outline Part One: General introduction to corpora What they’re good for How to get your hands on one Part Two: Corpora in translation studies research To warm you up: What does ‘cause’ (verb) mean? What does ‘provide’ mean? How often is the passive voice used in English? Handouts Tell me something I don’t know… Not all facts about language are accessible through native-speaker intuition It’s often impossible to describe meanings of words without reference to the contexts those words occur in Sometimes you need a lot of data to see patterns Sometimes you need to count What a corpus can help us see… cause has negative ‘semantic prosody’ provide has positive ‘semantic prosody’ (see Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995) in general, passive is used around 10% of the time in English (see Halliday 1991) Corpus a collection of naturally-occurring texts that are the object of literary or linguistic study held in electronic form thus amenable to (semi-)automatic processing usually assembled in some principled way often highly structured, containing very carefully selected texts compiled for a purpose eg linguistic analysis, lexicography, Natural Language Processing, translation research… or a by-product of another activity eg parliamentary debates (and their translations in bilingual or multilingual parliaments) Well-known monolingual corpora British National Corpus (100m words) http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ The Bank of English (524m words) http://www.collins.co.uk/books.aspx?group=153 free access to a sample of 56m words at http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.asp The entire World Wide Web .uk/ Corpora and corpus processing software Provide: a (relatively) objective basis for commentary on linguistic phenomena, or linguistic realizations of, eg, social phenomena a resource for quantitative and qualitative research the ability