12 noon - 1pm BST (GMT+1)
Wednesday 1 June 2022
How to use corpora to enhance translation and revision practices
Free
This event has passed
When working on a translation or revising a text, do you feel you can’t always get good answers to your questions from dictionaries or the Internet? This webinar will introduce you to corpora, and show you how translators and editors can use them to enhance the quality of the final text.
Translators and editors have to work with constrained language. They are not free to choose any words they wish, because they are bound by the source text, or by someone else’s words. As a consequence, translators and editors often have to look up words to understand what they mean, how they are used, whether they can be used in a certain context, or which alternative wordings are best in a given situation.
This webinar will teach you how to get the answers you need from corpora. Lexicographers use corpora to compile dictionaries, linguists use corpora to study languages, translation scholars use corpora to analyse translation, and natural language processing experts use corpora to develop machine translation programs. Translators and editors too can use corpora in their everyday practice. If corpora were initially complicated to use, this is not true anymore.
This introduction to corpora for translators and editors gives you a little taste of what we teach our students at the University of Surrey Centre for Translation Studies. It will cover the following questions:
- What exactly is a corpus?
- What can translators and editors gain from using corpora?
- What types of corpora can help translators and editors?
- In what ways can corpora enhance a translation/revision?
- Where to access and how to begin using corpora?
Biography
I teach and do research in the fields of translation, lexicography and assisted writing. I am particularly interested in corpus linguistics applications in these domains. I am Principal Investigator of ColloCaid, where we combine research into user needs, lexical computing and human-computer interaction to develop a text editor that supports writers with real-time collocation suggestions.
I was previously joint project leader of the COMPARA corpus (a 3-million word, open-access, bidirectional corpus of English and Portuguese fiction), Chief Editor of the Oxford Portuguese Dictionary (a corpus-based 70K word bilingual English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English dictionary with thousands of example sentences and translations based on real language usage), and lead researcher in the Supporting the Internationalization of Brazilian Research project (a series of workshops on the use of language and translation technologies to assist Brazilian researchers promote their research internationally, while simultaneously training academic English tutors in Brazil).