RESOURES AND

CORPORA IN
INTERPRETING
 Interpreting is a very difficult activity.

In many ways, interpreting is like going

down a ski slope.

In order to become a good interpreter,

you have to train hard (20 minutes each
day).
Preparation is the key.
Interrelationship between interpreting
and technology
The use of computer applications is common
to all language professions.

Information technology has transformed all

the activities dealing with language
acquisition and providing language services.
 Preparation and Corpus use
Professionals and trainees usually devote time
before an interpreting assignment in order to:
1. make an overview of the topic
2. familiarize with the specific terminology
other relevant information

!!! interpreters need to acquire specialized

linguistic and domain information in order to
bridge the knowledge gap that exists between
themselves and the expert speaking (especially in
the case of specialized assignments)
 Preparation and Corpus use
The importance of these activities is twofold:
The acquisition of topic-related knowledge
alleviates part of the cognitive load during
the interpreting phase
facilitates the anticipation and prediction of
information, which, in turn, has clear
advantages with regard to text
comprehension and production as well as the
overall interpreting process.
 Preparation and Corpus use
There is a general consensus that each interpreter
has individual preferences and habits about how
to prepare an assignment.
The most common way to prepare for an
assignment is by
identifying reliable sources of information
(texts),
extracting relevant information from them, and
drawing up a glossary
 Preparation and Corpus use
All of the above mentioned activities are
performed nowadays using software tools and
on-line resources.
As far as linguistic preparation is concerned (the
establishment of lexical correspondences in
several languages, interpreters have at their
disposal: online dictionaries, terminology
databases and encyclopedias.
They provide ready-made information, such as
definitions, equivalents and examples.
Requirements for the documents
they must be representative of the subject
matter;
they must be up-to-date;
original language documents;
written by specialists;
they must be explicit;
the sources of documents must be
indicated and referenced in a
bibliography.
Useful resources
Online dictionaries:
https://www.lexico.com/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/
https://www.multitran.com/
Terminology data banks

IATE
TERMIUM
FAOTERM
IMF
LeGrand Dictionnaire Terminologique
TERM-MINATOR
UNESCOTERM
UNOGTerm
UNTERM
 Databases:
IATE
INTERACTIVE TERMINOLOGY FOR EUROPE
www.iate.europa.eu
the terminology database for all EU institutions.
IATE has been operational since 2004 with the aim
of providing an internet-based service for sharing
terminology between institutions.
In 2006 a public version of the site was launched.
The Internet version of IATE now receives over 70
million queries a year.
 IATE
includes more than 9 million terms in the
24 official EU languages.
The terms are submitted by translators
from European institutions and then
verified by the linguistic department’s
terminologists. It is available online free
of charge.
 UNTerm
UNTerm is the United Nation’s
terminology database. It contains
technical and specialized terminology in
each of the six official UN languages
(English, French, Spanish, Russian,
Mandarin and Arabic) as well as phrases
frequently used by the Organization.
FAOTERM
FAOTERM: the Food and Agricutlure
Organization of the United Nations’
terminology portal. It contains more than
80,000 entries in the six official languages
of the United Nations (English, French,
Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Mandarin).
 FAOTERM
 Aquaculture
 Aquatic species
 Avian influenza
 Climate change and bioenergy
 Desert locust
 FAOTERM
 FAO Structure
 Fire management
 Fisheries
 Incident Command System
 Nutrition (A Glossary of commonly used nutrition terms in Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Spanish
and Russian.)
 Organic agriculture
 Phytosanitary glossary
 Right to food (pdf glossary in EN, FR, SP. It contains 418 concepts with synonyms, variants,
definitions, remarks and context fields, as appropriate)
 Water
 such resources may have at least three
disadvantages
Despite all the advantages, however
1. perfect terminology correspondence among two or more
languages is difficult to establish, for example, in the case of legal
terminology, or because the domains are new and terms have not
been coined in all languages.
2. the high variability and constant evolution of specialized
communication make it virtually impossible to find ready-to-use
resources available in all possible domains. This means interpreters
may not have at disposal any resources for a particular topic.
3. available resources often lack contextual information and its
“reassuring added value” as well as important details such as
definitions or examples which are vital to contextualize the
information == can potentially lead to sub-optimal performance or
even translation errors.
 Use of search engines
When ready-to-use resources for a specific domain
and language are missing, search engines are used to
obtain relevant sources.
Advantages: the easiness of use and the fact that new
information is mainly processed in context;
Limitations:
finding and manually processing adequate texts is
quite time consuming, and
relying on simple frequencies obtained from search
engines allow little to be said about terms because
there is no restriction to a specific domain or genre.
While search engines, electronic
dictionaries, and terminological databases
find widespread use among novice and
experienced interpreters, corpora still
seem to be quite unfamiliar to most
professionals and trainees.
Speech corpora
Corpora
https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en
Reasons to use Corpora
provide useful insight into word meaning
and use,
extracting terminology for translation and
interpreting tasks and,
if used as a preparation aid, in improving
overall terminology rendition during
interpretation