Previous years/archive

 

1 October 2010

 

In order to celebrate St. Jerome's Day, a translation seminar is arranged every year by the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication.

Program

This year's lectures: 
 

Professor Silvia Bernardini, University of Bologna
Professor Federico Zanettin, University of Perugia

 

 Silvia Bernardini:

 

"Parallel corpora and the search for translation norms/universals"
 

For almost two decades now, mainstream corpus-based research in
descriptive translation studies has centred around the computerised
analysis of translated and comparable non-translated texts (so-called
/monolingual comparable/ corpora). These have been suggested to better
serve a target-oriented, descriptive approach to translation research
than /parallel/ corpora, which in turn have come to be perceived as
somewhat backward-looking, favouring source-oriented,
equivalence-focused, at worst anecdotal, observations.

 

In this talk I argue that comparable and parallel corpora in fact offer complementary  perspectives on translation norms/universals, such that neither would
suffice in isolation to shed full light on this complex research topic.

 
The point is illustrated with reference to the search for
phraseological regularities in both specialised (technical) and fiction translation.
 

 

Federico Zanettin:

 

"Building multilingual corpora for translation studies: issues and perspectives"

 

While obviously of interest to corpus-based descriptive translation studies, bilingual and multilingual corpora seem so far to have attracted more interest on the part of scholars working within related but distinct fields, namely machine translation and contrastive linguistics. The reasons for this are perhaps to be sought mainly in


1) the scarcity of language resources, that is available multilingual corpora and b) the lack of suitable computational resources, that is software tools available to translation scholars.
 

However, more and more sources of multilingual corpora can now be found on the Internet, and research in computational linguistics and machine translation has produced increasingly more resources and tools which, while originally developed for other purposes are now available for public use, and are thus accessible to translation scholars. The use of the Web as a platform to distribute and share corpus resources and tools also addresses some fundamental issues in corpus-based translation studies, including the applicability of these tools and resources to translation studies research, the advantages and limits of annotation standards, and the benefits and challenges of manually constructed vs. semi-automatically assembled corpora.

 
This presentation will first offer an overview of some of the tools and resources available for the creation of multilingual corpora, then consider some of the issues involved.