Text corpora, professional translators and translator training

ABSTRACT

Although machine translation software and CAT tools are commonly used both by professional translators and by those involved in the training of translators, the usefulness of electronic text corpora for these purposes is less widely known. Corpora of various types have become much easier to access during the last decade, and the main obstacle to their becoming a standard tool for translators is currently the inertia of both the industry and universities. Translator training in universities can play an important role in promoting new working methods. To study to what extent corpora are present in university translator training programmes, a survey was carried out. The responses show that corpora are indeed becoming part of curricula, at least in EU countries. However, the role of corpora in these programmes is often peripheral. For example, compiling Do-It-Yourself corpora – a very important skill for translators – is still taught in only a few university programmes. For the most part, corpora are used mainly as a research instrument rather than as a tool in practical translation work.

KEYWORDS:

• Text corpora for translation
• translator training
• Do-It-Yourself corpora
• LSP corpora
• CAT tools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Less typical are collections of texts produced by children, by language learners, and other specific groups, to study their language performance and to develop new methods of teaching, and the like.

2. In the recent years such tools have been made more available and easier to use, e.g. the users of Sketch Engine can create ad hoc parallel corpora and upload aligned texts. Sketch Engine performs lemmatisation and morpho-syntactic analysis with integrated parsers.

3. This issue is widely discussed among translator trainers and can be observed indirectly in many surveys, e.g. (Mikhailov 2015): 96.

4. The questionnaire and the data set are available online at <https://puolukka.rd.tuni.fi/corpora_and_translators>

5. In fact, 23 respondents of the 91 said that they did not have corpus studies in their programmes. However, after checking their answers to other questions, it became clear that four informants obviously either misunderstood the question or pressed the wrong button, because their answers clearly indicate that they do have corpus studies integrated in their curricula.