Research Resources
Translation Resources
French Commercial-Legal-Diplomatic Translation: General
French Diplomatic Translation: Treaties
French Medical Translation
Spanish Commercial, Legal Translation
Spanish Medical Translation
Terminology and Language Technology Resources
The Handbook of Terminology Management
Standards for Content Creation and Globalization
The Information Cycle Feedback Loop
Knowledge Organization Sources and Systems
Corpus Resources
Corpora are electronic bodies of linguistic data(texts) that linguists extract (isolate from their larger texts) and concordance (align by keyword) to generate natural language samples for term, phrase or syntax modeling. Corpora can help translators empirically verify their intuitions about sense, connotation and near-synonymy, show patterns of actual frequencies or potential language use, reveal the lexical density of a text (particularly in translation research), identify semantic prosodies (connotations) and semantic preferences (the “clustering” of words around certain poles of meaning), and assist in overcoming imperfect overlap in collocational ranges across languages. Hatim and Munday (2005) map corpora in translation use as an interface with the language engineering discipline. Customized corpora may be generated with leaseable software, while “found” corpora—some in the multimillions of words—are available on web-based concordancing sites.
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Alignment: The matching or linking of a text and its translation(s), usually paragraph by paragraph and/or sentence. Texts are often aligned in this way so that bilingual CONCORDANCES can be retrieved. Some alignment can be done automatically by software, although best results are usually produced when a human user checks the automatic alignment and corrects where necessary. Alphanumeric: Of ASCII characters, any string composed of only up-or lower-case English letters or Arabic numerals. AMALGAM (Automatic Mapping Among Lexicon Grassmmatical Annotation Models) Anaphora: Pronouns, noun phrases, etc. which refer back to something already mentioned in a text; sometimes the term is used more loosely—and, technically, incorrectly— to refer in general to items which co-refer, even when they do not occur in the text itself (expophora) or when they refer forwards rather than backwards in the text (cataphora). Annotation: (1) The practice of adding explicit additional information to the machine-readable text; (2) The physical representation of such information. ARCHER: a Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers ASCII: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a standard character set that maps character codes 0 through 127 (low ASCII) onto control functions, punctuation marks, digits, upper case letters, and other symbols. Attribute: In SGML, a quantifier within the opening tag for an element which specifies a value for some named property of that element. Authenticity: a feature that characterizes naturally occurring corpus data BFT (Binary File Transfer): A way of sending files by ftp. The are sent in binary code, not translated into ASCII, which would risk some information loss. CALL: computer-aided (or assisted) language learning CAMET: Computer Archive of Modern English Texts, a project of Geoffery Leech of the Department of Language and Modern English in 1970. Character encoding: a system of using numeric values to represent characters COCOA (Computations in Commutative Algebra): A method of text encoding used by the Oxford Concordance Program and other software. Colligation: the collocation of a node word with a particular grammatical class of words Collocation: the characteristic co-occurrence of patterns of words Comparable corpus: a corpus which is composed of L1 data collected from different languages using the same sampling techniques Comparative corpus: a corpus containing components of varieties of the same language Concordance: an alphabetical index of a search pattern in a corpus, showing every contextual occurrence of the search pattern Corpus balance: the range of different types of language that a corpus claims to cover Corpus header: the part of a corpus that provides necessary bibliographical information, taxonomies used and other metadata relating to a corpus Corpuses: a less commonly used plural form of corpus
Cross-tabulation: a table showing the frequencies for each variable across each sample Dispersion: a term in descriptive statistics which refers to a quantifiable variation of measurements of differing members of a population within the scale on which they are measured Ditto tag: in corpus annotation assigning the same part-of-speech code to each word in an idiomatic expression DTD: Document Type Definitions in markup languages such as HTML, SGML and XML Error-tagging: assigning codes indicating the types of errors occurring in a learner corpus Factor analysis: a statistical analysis commonly used in the social and behavioural sciences to summarize the interrelationships among a large group of variables in a concise fashion fisher's exact test: an alternative to the chi-square or log-likelihood test that measures exact statistical significance level Frequency: also called raw frequency, the actual count of a linguistic feature in a corpus Interlanguage: the learner’s knowledge of the L2 which is independent of both the L1 and the actual L2 Keyword: words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus KWIC: key-word-in-context concordance Lemmatization: grouping together all of the different inflected forms of the same word Lexicon: an inventory of word forms in a given language Log-likelihood test: also known as an LL test, an alternative to the chi-square test Markup: a system of standard codes inserted into a document stored in electronic form to provide information about the text itself and govern formatting, printing or other processing Mean: the arithmetic average, which can be calculated by adding all of the scores together and then dividing the sum by the number of scores Merger: combination of two or more words (e.g. can’t and gonna) Metadata: a term used to describe data about data, typically the contextual information of corpus samples MI: mutual information, a statistical formula borrowed from information theory Microconcord: a concordance package published the Oxford University Press Monitor corpus: a corpus that is constantly supplemented with fresh material and keeps increasing in size Normalization: a process which makes frequencies from samples of markedly different sizes comparable by bringing them to a common base Parallel corpus: a corpus which is composed of source texts and their translations in one or more different languages;also known as a translation corpus
Parsing: also called treebanking or bracketing, a process that analyzes the sentences in a corpus into their constituents POS: part-of-speech Post-editing: human correction of automatically processed data Range: the difference between the highest and lowest frequencies Reference corpus: a balanced representative corpus balanced for general usage; in keyword analysis, a corpus that is used to provide a reference wordlist
Representativeness: a corpus is thought to be representative of the language variety it is supposed to represent if the findings based on its contents can be generalized to the said language variety RP: Received Pronunciation, the notional standard form of spoken British English Sample: elements that are selected intentionally as a representation of the population being studied Sample corpus: as opposed to a monitor corpus, a sample corpus is of finite size and consists of text segments selected to provide a static snapshot of language
Semantic prosody: the collocational meaning arising from the interaction between a given node word and its collocates SEU: Survey of English Usage Skeleton parsing: also called shallow parsing, a parsing technique that uses less fine-grained constituent types rather than would be present in a full parse Sort: arrange concordances or a wordlist in a certain order Span: a term used to refer to the measurement, in words, of the co-text of a word selected for study. Specialized corpus: a corpus that is domain or genre specific and is designed to represent a sublanguage SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences Standardized type-token ratio: similar to type-token ratio, but computed every n (e.g. 1,000) words as the WordSmith Wordlist goes through each text file Sub corpus: a component of a corpus, usually defined using certain criteria such as text types and domains Tagging: an alternative term for annotation, especially word-level annotation such as POS tagging and semantic tagging Tagset: a collection of tags in the form of a scheme for annotating corpora. Text chunking: the practice of dividing sentences into non-overlapping segments on the basis of fairly superficial analysis Token: an occurrence of any given word form Tokenization: also called segmentation, a process that divides running text into legitimate word tokens, especially important for languages such as Chinese that do not delimit words with white spaces Transcription: converting spoken data into a written form Treebank: an alternative term for a parsed corpus T-test: an alternative statistical test to the chi-square test Type: a word form Type-token ratio: the ratio between types and tokens, useful when comparing samples of roughly equal length Unicode: a character encoding system designed to support the interchange, processing, and display of all of the written texts of the diverse languages of the world Wildcard: a special character such as an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) that can be used to represent one or more characters in pattern matching Wordlist: a list of words occurring in a corpus, possibly with frequency information
WordSmith: a corpus exploration package with sophisticated statistical analysis, published by the Oxford University Press Z-test: an alternative statistical test to chi-square test References: Baker, Paul, Andrew Hardie & Tony McEnery. A Glossary of Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Olohan, Maeve. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. New York: Routledge, 2004 Wang, Kefei. Research and Application of Bilingual Parallel Corpora. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2004 |
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Adab, B. (2001). The Translation of Advertising: A Framework for Evaluation. Babel, 47(2), 133-157. Wu, A., & Huang, L. (2006). On Corpus-Based Studies of Translation Universals. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 38(5),296-302. Zanettin, Federico (2002) "DIY Corpora: The WWW and the Translator In Maia, Belinda / Haller, Jonathan / Urlrych, Margherita (eds.) Training the Language Services Provider for the New Millennium, Porto: Facultade de Letras, Universidade do Porto, 239-248. (2002) "Corpora for translation practice". In Elia Yuste-Rodrigo (ed.) Language Resources for Translation Work and Research, LREC 2002 Workshop Proceedings, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 10-14. (2002) "CEXI. Designing an English Italian Translational Corpus". In Ketteman, Bernhard / Marko, Georg (eds.) Teaching and Learning by Doing Corpus Analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 329-343. Journals:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (1996-) (Published twice per year by John Benjamins. Papers on corpora for linguistics and human language technology.) Corpora http://www.eupjournals.com/journal/cor (A new journal of corpus linguistics focusing on the many and varied uses of corpora both in linguistics and beyond. The journal accepts articles presenting research findings based on the exploitation of corpora as well as accounts of corpus building, corpus tool construction and corpus annotation schemes.) |