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Old Needs, New Solutions: Comparable Corpora for Language Professionals

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Building and Using Comparable Corpora

Abstract

Use of corpora by language service providers and language professionals remains limited due to the existence of competing resources that are likely to be perceived as less demanding in terms of time and effort required to obtain and (learn to) use them (e.g. translation memory software, term bases and so forth). These resources however have limitations that could be compensated for through the integration of comparable corpora and corpus building tools in the translator’s toolkit. This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which different types of comparable corpora can be used in translation teaching and practice. First, two traditional corpus typologies are presented, namely small and specialized “handmade” corpora collected by end-users themselves for a specific task, and large and general “manufactured” corpora collected by expert teams and made available to end users. We suggest that striking a middleground between these two opposites is vital for professional uptake. To this end, we show how the BootCaT toolkit can be used to construct largish and relatively specialized comparable corpora for a specific translation task, and how, varying the search parameters in very simple ways, the size and usability of the corpora thus constructed can be further increased. The process is exemplified with reference to a simulated task (the translation of a patient information leaflet from English into Italian) and its efficacy is evaluated through an end-user questionnaire.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This may change in the future, as more tools like Linguee (http://www.linguee.com/) provide access to the aligned web, and possibly to subsections of it.

  2. 2.

    As suggested in the previous section, in this chapter we are not specifically discussing aligned parallel corpora. In our view these are more akin to TMs than to comparable corpora in terms of the technical issues involved in their construction and consultation, and of the type of insights translators can obtain from them; they are therefore not directly relevant here.

  3. 3.

    “More advanced” corpus querying techniques, like extraction of keywords or computation of collocational scores can of course be of great interest to translators. However, their relevance and usefulness may be hard to grasp for less corpus-savvy users, and hence they are not discussed here.

  4. 4.

    See http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php for information about ukWaC and itWaC.

  5. 5.

    Currently BootCaT uses Bing for URL retrieval, after both Google and Yahoo! discontinued their API services.

  6. 6.

    http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html

  7. 7.

    In this paper we define genre (loosely based on Swales [34]) as a recognizable set of communicative events with a shared purpose and common formal features.

  8. 8.

    We used the frontend developed by Eros Zanchetta [37] and available here: http://bootcat.sslmit.unibo.it/.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students and colleagues who have kindly accepted to evaluate the URLs for us, Claudia Lecci for her expert insights about TM software, Federico Gaspari for fruitful lunchtime discussions on corpus construction strategies as well as the anonymous reviewer and the editors of the volume for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Interpreting and Translation, Corso della Repubblica 136, 47121, Forlì, FC, Italy

    Silvia Bernardini & Adriano Ferraresi

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  1. Silvia Bernardini
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  2. Adriano Ferraresi
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Correspondence to Silvia Bernardini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Serge Sharoff

  2. University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Reinhard Rapp

  3. Université de Paris-Sud LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Pierre Zweigenbaum

  4. Electronic & Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China

    Pascale Fung

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Bernardini, S., Ferraresi, A. (2013). Old Needs, New Solutions: Comparable Corpora for Language Professionals. In: Sharoff, S., Rapp, R., Zweigenbaum, P., Fung, P. (eds) Building and Using Comparable Corpora. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20128-8_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20128-8_16

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20128-8

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