Old needs, new solutions: Comparable corpora for language professionals

Abstract

Use of corpora by language service providers and language professionals remains limited due to the existence of competing resources that are likely to be perceived as less demanding in terms of time and effort required to obtain and (learn to) use them (e.g. translation memory software, term bases and so forth). These resources however have limitations that could be compensated for through the integration of comparable corpora and corpus building tools in the translator’s toolkit. This chapter provides an overview of the ways in which different types of comparable corpora can be used in translation teaching and practice. First, two traditional corpus typologies are presented, namely small and specialized “handmade” corpora collected by endusers themselves for a specific task, and large and general “manufactured” corpora collected by expert teams and made available to end users. We suggest that striking a middle g round between these two opposites is vital for professional uptake. To this end, we show how the Boot CaT toolkit can be used to construct largish and relatively specialized comparable corpora for a specific translation task, and how, varying the search parameters in very simple ways, the size and usability of the corpora thus constructed can be further increased. The process is exemplified with reference to a simulated task (the translation of a patient information leaflet from English into Italian) and its efficacy is evaluated through an end-user questionnaire.