Corpus linguistics for translators

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Corpus linguistics for translators

• Amanda Saksida
• University of Nova Gorica

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... He cast a sídeways look at Harry under his
bushy eyebrows. Be grateful if yeh didnt
mention that ter anyone at Hogwarts, he said.
Im er not supposed ter do magic, strictly
speakin.
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... He cast a sídeways look at Harry under his
bushy eyebrows. Be grateful if yeh didnt
mention that ter anyone at Hogwarts, he said.
Im er not supposed ter do magic, strictly
speakin.
Hedwig Harry Hogwarts Hagrid Quidditch ...
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... He cast a sídeways look at Harry under his
bushy eyebrows. Be grateful if yeh didnt
mention that ter anyone at Hogwarts, he said.
Im er not supposed ter do magic, strictly
speakin.
Hedwig Harry Hogwarts Hagrid Quidditch ...
wart hog Phacochoerus aethiopicus
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... He cast a sídeways look at Harry under his
bushy eyebrows. Be grateful if yeh didnt
mention that ter anyone at Hogwarts, he said.
Im er not supposed ter do magic, strictly
speakin.
Hedwig Harry Hogwarts Hagrid Quidditch ...
wart hog Phacochoerus aethiopicus
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(No Transcript)
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Course outline

• Introductory what is corpora, hystory, typology,
  online corpora,
• Areas where corpora are being used,
• Corpus-based translation studies interesting
  examples
• Tools for building and usage of corpora

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What is corpus

• A corpus is a collection of pieces of language
  that are selected and ordered according to
  explicit linguistic criteria in order to be used
  as a sample of the language.
• Computer corpus a corpus which is encoded in a
  standardised and homogeneous way for open-ended
  retrieval tasks. Its constituent pieces of
  language are documented as to their origins and
  provenance.
• (Guidelines of the Expert Advisory Group on
  Language Engineering Standards, 1996)
• Big collections of modern texts
• Electronic form
• Representative for language/dialect
• Base for desctiptive studies (not prescriptive!)

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Brief hystory of corpus linguistics

• 1964 Brown corpus (1 M words)
• John Sinclair and the Cobuild-Revolution gt Bank
  of English (470 M),
• British National Corpus (100 M) gt Other
  languages Czec, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovac, )
• Web as corpus with the digital revolution, more
  and more texts are available on the net gt
  programs that build corpora using on-line texts
  (WebBootCat, http//www.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/wb
  c/mycorp.cgi)

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Types of corpora

• Kinds of corpora
• Medium written texts / spoken language
• Size referential corpora / specialized corpora
• Time span synchronic/diachronic corpora
• Tagging lemmatized / POS-tagged corpus
• Language mono- or multilingual corpora
• paralell
• comparable
• translational

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Corpus usage

• Lexicography
• Descriptive Grammars
• Translational tools and studies
• Foreign languages learning
• Socio-linguistic studies
• Language technologies

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Keywords

• Concordance
• KWIC (Keyword in Context)
• Type / Token
• Tag / Lemma
• Collocation

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What can a corpus tell us?

• Word frequency
• How frequent a word / word form is (copared to
  other words)?
• Lexical information
• Which word frequently coocur?
• Which affixes can a word have?
• Syntactical information
• In which syntactical structures can a word occur?
• Semantical information
• What are the possible meanings of a word?
• Pragmatic information
• In which texts can we find a word? What stylistic
  inforamtion does a word or it's context bear?
  Does the usage of a word stagnate, is the
  frequency increasing or decreasing?

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What can a corpus tell us?

• Translational studies
• Parallel corpus studies can reveal
  characteristics of translated texts, such as
  tendencies towards explicitness and avoidance of
  repetition.
• Comparison between the translation part of the
  corpus and a corpus of texts of the same genre,
  written in the target language for the
  translation corpus, reveals a tendency towards
  what we might call the Eliza Doolittle
  phenomenon the translated texts, more than the
  texts in the control corpus, tend to contain
  those TL phrases, structures, and so on, which,
  from a comparative point of view, seem
  particularly characteristic of the
  TL. (Malmkjaer 1996)

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Some of the online corpora

• British National Corpus
• http//www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
• http//view.byu.edu
• Bank of English
• http//www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
• CORIS
• http//corpus.cilta.unibo.it8080/DEMOCORISCorpQue
  ry.html
• FidaPLUS
• www.fidaplus.net
• Good link
• http//devoted.to/corpora

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Tools for translating

• Sentence alignment
• TRADOS WinAlign
• ATRIL DejaVu
• Vanilla Aligner (unix/linux)
• Concordances
• Wordsmith Tools (www.lexically.net)
• Sketch Engine (http//www.sketchengine.co.uk)
• MonoConc/ParaConc (www.athel.com)
• aConCorde - gut für Arabisch (http//www.comp.lee
  ds.ac.uk/andyr/software/aConCorde/)
• CQP (ims.uni-stuttgart.de)
• Manatee / Bonito (www.textforge.cz)

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Corpus linguistics in Turkey

• Kemal Oflazer http//www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ko/
• Informatics Institute corpus http//www.ii.metu.e
  du.tr/corpus/