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Dipsik Posted 16 years ago
Essay & Composition Writing
Summary
Hello,
I'd be very grateful if someone could proofread my summary. My task was to "shrink" a several- page document to one standard page.
Many thanks in advance for wasting your time on it!
Lenny
Using a Specialized Corpus to Improve Translation Quality
A corpus – a large electronic collection of texts – is a useful translation tool. The information in the corpus can be investigated using corpus analysis tools; e.g. “concordancer”, which provides some co-text of each of word occurences.
Wilkinson says that the use of corpus analysis tools in translation education has – at least in Finland – been rather neglected. Realizing also that corpora are not widely used by practising translators either, Michael Wilkinson began compiling a corpus of English-language tourism brochures in 2004.
Being an experienced translator in this field himself, Wilkinson knew of the high demand in Finland for English translations, also aware of the difficulties that face the translator of such texts; e.g. translating culture-specific terms. In September 2004, a corpus amounting to 670,000 words was completed and subsequently exploited by Wilkinson’s students.
The corpus, which contains a number of texts from Canadian brochures and thus also many Finnish culture-specific terms, has proved useful for finding information about collocates, especially adjective-noun ones.
Researchers have pointed out that corpora allow unpredictable learning – incidental discoveries of relevant information. It has been suggested that the greatest benefit of corpora is that they provide multi-word “chunks” which help students to produce maximally natural texts.
Wilkinson dismisses the concern that corpora contribute to the language becoming increasingly flat and conventional, claiming that creative searching results in a wealth of answers, and reminding that corpora are not supposed to replace other resources.
The Tourism Corpus is intended to be an open corpus. Since specialized corpora are thin on the ground, the translator needs to learn to compile such corpora.
I'd be very grateful if someone could proofread my summary. My task was to "shrink" a several- page document to one standard page.
Many thanks in advance for wasting your time on it!
Lenny
Using a Specialized Corpus to Improve Translation Quality
A corpus – a large electronic collection of texts – is a useful translation tool. The information in the corpus can be investigated using corpus analysis tools; e.g. “concordancer”, which provides some co-text of each of word occurences.
Wilkinson says that the use of corpus analysis tools in translation education has – at least in Finland – been rather neglected. Realizing also that corpora are not widely used by practising translators either, Michael Wilkinson began compiling a corpus of English-language tourism brochures in 2004.
Being an experienced translator in this field himself, Wilkinson knew of the high demand in Finland for English translations, also aware of the difficulties that face the translator of such texts; e.g. translating culture-specific terms. In September 2004, a corpus amounting to 670,000 words was completed and subsequently exploited by Wilkinson’s students.
The corpus, which contains a number of texts from Canadian brochures and thus also many Finnish culture-specific terms, has proved useful for finding information about collocates, especially adjective-noun ones.
Researchers have pointed out that corpora allow unpredictable learning – incidental discoveries of relevant information. It has been suggested that the greatest benefit of corpora is that they provide multi-word “chunks” which help students to produce maximally natural texts.
Wilkinson dismisses the concern that corpora contribute to the language becoming increasingly flat and conventional, claiming that creative searching results in a wealth of answers, and reminding that corpora are not supposed to replace other resources.
The Tourism Corpus is intended to be an open corpus. Since specialized corpora are thin on the ground, the translator needs to learn to compile such corpora.
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