Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach

Translators and editors who work in a specialised field—a particular branch of medicine, technology or finance, for instance—may find it difficult to acquire (or enhance) their domain-specific knowledge other than by learning as they go or going back to college. Both strategies can be slow and costl...

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Main Authors: Stephen Waller, Mary Ellen Kerans, Ailish Maher
Format: Article
Language:deu
Published: ZHAW 2008-07-01
Series:JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation
Online Access:https://www.jostrans.org/article/view/7348
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author Stephen Waller
Mary Ellen Kerans
Ailish Maher
author_facet Stephen Waller
Mary Ellen Kerans
Ailish Maher
author_sort Stephen Waller
collection DOAJ
description Translators and editors who work in a specialised field—a particular branch of medicine, technology or finance, for instance—may find it difficult to acquire (or enhance) their domain-specific knowledge other than by learning as they go or going back to college. Both strategies can be slow and costly. Our paper describes a faster, more economical way to climb the specialist learning ladder, namely a corpus-guided approach to translating, revising and editing. We describe two tools for analysing a corpus of model texts: on the one hand, a user-friendly concordancer with an intuitive interface; on the other, an equally easy-to-use desktop-based indexer. Finally, we propose an approach to the issue of corpus size (sampling adequacy) that provides a practical solution for the working translator: we recommend creating a carefully chosen, cleaned text collection that functions as a reliable substrate corpus for language pattern guidance and adding to it an ad-hoc ‘quick and dirty’ corpus to further narrow the topic focus as needed.
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spelling doaj-art-74b22918eb77487582b96fa81c1aa3e52025-08-20T02:21:16ZdeuZHAWJoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation1740-357X2008-07-011010.26034/cm.jostrans.2008.661Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approachStephen WallerMary Ellen KeransAilish MaherTranslators and editors who work in a specialised field—a particular branch of medicine, technology or finance, for instance—may find it difficult to acquire (or enhance) their domain-specific knowledge other than by learning as they go or going back to college. Both strategies can be slow and costly. Our paper describes a faster, more economical way to climb the specialist learning ladder, namely a corpus-guided approach to translating, revising and editing. We describe two tools for analysing a corpus of model texts: on the one hand, a user-friendly concordancer with an intuitive interface; on the other, an equally easy-to-use desktop-based indexer. Finally, we propose an approach to the issue of corpus size (sampling adequacy) that provides a practical solution for the working translator: we recommend creating a carefully chosen, cleaned text collection that functions as a reliable substrate corpus for language pattern guidance and adding to it an ad-hoc ‘quick and dirty’ corpus to further narrow the topic focus as needed.https://www.jostrans.org/article/view/7348
spellingShingle Stephen Waller
Mary Ellen Kerans
Ailish Maher
Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach
JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation
title Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach
title_full Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach
title_fullStr Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach
title_full_unstemmed Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach
title_short Acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism: the monolingual corpus-guided approach
title_sort acquiring or enhancing a translation specialism the monolingual corpus guided approach
url https://www.jostrans.org/article/view/7348
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AT maryellenkerans acquiringorenhancingatranslationspecialismthemonolingualcorpusguidedapproach
AT ailishmaher acquiringorenhancingatranslationspecialismthemonolingualcorpusguidedapproach