Corpora in Translation Practice

Federico Zanettin
In this article Federico Zanettin talks about corpora its benefits, types, and its relationship with
translation. First let’s start with the definition of corpus a “corpus” is a collection of electronic texts
assembled according to explicit design criteria which usually aim at representing a larger textual
population(zanettin) and its plural form is corpora. Corpora have two types 1- Parallel corpora 2-
monolingual corpora3- Bilingual corpora. There are some differences between Parallel corpora and
bilingual dictionaries like:

 Bilingual dictionaries are repertories of lexical equivalents

 Parallel corpora are repertoires of strategies deployed by past translators, as well as
repertoires of translation equivalents.
 Parallel corpora can provide information that bilingual dictionaries do not usually contain.
 Parallel corpora can provide information that bilingual dictionaries do not usually contain
like Salman Rushdie (Zanettin, 2001b), the word “edges "he omits this word from the Italian
translation.

A corpus can be classified along a scale which goes from “robust” to “virtual.

Lastly, the author has some suggestions for improvements like:

 “Robust “reference corpora need to become more accessible

 In order for “virtual” corpora to become more widespread among translators

Principles of corpus linguistics and their application to translation studies research

Gabriela Saldanha

Corpora fulfil different roles like providing data, building statistical machine translation systems and
revealing ideological stance in politically sensitive texts but ‘Corpus linguistics’ is understood here in
a more restricted sense linked to the cultural and historical context in which it is produced. Different
definitions of corpus emphasize different aspects of this resource like the definition of McEnery and
Wilson (1996: 87 as cited in Saldanha): “a body of text which is carefully sampled to be maximally
representative of a language or language variety” emphasizes representativeness.

 Corpus linguistics is not a linguistic theory but a methodology that can be applied to a wide
range of linguistic enquiries
 The use of corpora in translation studies research was first proposed as particularly adapted
to the purposes of empirical descriptive translation studies
 Corpus linguistics and descriptive translation studies focus on ‘attested’ language
production.
 Descriptive translation studies aim to establish distinctive features of translated texts
 texts and text types are studied comparatively across text corpora.
 Tognini-Bonelli (2001, as cited in Saldanha) has distinguished between corpus-based and
corpus-driven studies, the main difference being that the former approach starts with a pre-
existing theory which is validated using corpus data
 corpus-based linguistics gives priority to the pre-existing theoretical statement and, rather
than account for the variability of naturally occurring language, it attempts to “insulate it,
standardize it and reduce it” (ibid: 67, as cited in Saldanha).

"The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin (Translation)"

Steven Rendall