- •Abstract
- •Translation competencies
- •Subject-field Understanding
- •It is therefore inconceivable for translator training institutes to try to teach students about all or even many subject fields; instead, we can only hope
- •Corpus Analysis Tool
- •Experiment
- •In other words, the necessary informa- tion was there, but it was not easy to find.
- •In the case of register, the problems seemed to be largely related to particular students, rather than to either of the available types of resources.
- •Involved.
- •In addition to providing them with such resources, we should also endeavour to provide them with the skills necessary to compile similar resources of their own in the future.
- •Interestingly, none of the students commented on the usefulness of any of the resources other than the dictionaries
Corpus Analysis Tool
The corpus analysis tool used in our experiment was WordSmith Tools, developed by Mike Scott.
WordSmith provides the following features which we felt could be of use to translators:
a) a concordancer, which finds and displays, in an easy-to-read format
KWIC — key word in context) all occurrences of a search term (and minor varia- tions thereof);
b) a collocation viewer, which allows users to see which words "go together;"
c) frequency operations, which provide statistical information about the central- ity of a pattern
whether it is just one author's idiosyncratic usage or an ac- cepted pattern in expert discourse).
The students had been given training on how to use the tool during their corpus linguistics class, so they were familiar with these basic features; however, they had never previously tried to apply the tool to a translation situation.
NATIVE-LANGUAGE CORPORA AS A TRANSLATION RESOURCE 9
3.
6.
Experiment
For the purpose of this experiment, all students were translating out of their for- eign language (French) into their native language (English).
Students were presented with two different extracts from an article on optical scanners.
They were asked to translate one of the texts using the following resources as necessary: a selection of gen- eral bilingual dictionaries and a selection of monolingual specialized lexicographic and non-lexicographic resources.
15 They were then asked to translate the second text using the following resources as necessary: a selection of general bilingual dictionaries and a specialized monolingual native-language corpus coupled with the WordSmith Tools corpus analysis tool.
In an attempt to compensate for 1) any potential text-specific dif- ficulties, and 2) differences in student ability, students 1-7 were asked to translate text i using the conventional resources and text ii using the corpus, whereas students 8-14 were asked to translate text ii using conventional resources and text i using the corpus.
The students were given two hours to translate each text.
They were also asked to comment on the usefulness of the monolingual resources they had at their disposal (whether it be the conventional resources or the corpus).
>> Data Analysis
The aim of the pilot study was to determine whether a specialized monolingual native-language corpus would help translators to produce improved quality transla- tions.
Because our sample size was small in a number of respects (14 students, 2 texts, 1 subject field), we felt that we would not be able to make any definitive conclusions, but could only reasonably measure general trends.
Therefore, translations were assessed for the following broad categories of errors: 1) comprehension errors, specifically errors resulting from a lack of comprehension of the subject field; 2) production errors including incorrect choice of term, non-idiomatic constructions, grammatical errors, and incorrect register.
Improved subject comprehension: an example
The following example shows how the corpus has the potential to help students to
acquire an increased understanding of the subject field.
In text i, most of the students had difficulty grasping one of the concepts in the opening sentence of the text.
which should logically be translated along the following lines:
Regardless of such characteristics as colour-recognition capability, speed, precision,.
NATIVE-LANGUAGE CORPORA AS A TRANSLATION RESOURCE 11
The specialized dictionaries treated the concept scanner in general, but did not discuss the colour-recognition capability of scanners.
The user manual made a passing reference to "black-and-white vs.
colour scanners.
" The desktop publishing monograph contained a half-page discussion on the difference between "non-greyscale scanners, greyscale scanners, and colour scanners," but this section did not feature specifically in the table of contents and was therefore not easy to locate (though there were index ref- erences to each of the terms individually).
The journal article treated the issue of colour recognition in some depth, but this discussion was towards the end of the article and was not visibly set off from the rest of the text.