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Designing a Corpus for Translation and Language Teaching: The CEXI Experience
... In terms of vocabulary, seven studies found that L2 writers exhibited more anxiety and difficulty with vocabulary (Arndt). As for the translation in writing, Bernardini (2003) in her study of translation and language teaching suggested the foreign culture in translation; for example, the perception English writers have of Italian culture as exhibited by the Italian expressions in English fiction. This feature belongs to professional translation. ...
... 1123). 3 According to Jacques Derrida, -One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center's place in its absence-the sign is added, occurs as surplus, as a supplement‖ (p. 1123). ...
... You are a __ freshman (FR), __ sophomore (SO), __ junior (JU), or __ senior (SE). 3. ...
Course designs for Basic English Writing classes vary from one course to another. The objective of this study was to investigate the semantic misinterpretation of English words found in the English compositions written by native-Chinese-speaking undergraduate students and to overcome if such a barrier occurred in the process of writing. First, this study made use of both linguistic and literary theories in an attempt of exemplifying the existence of the translation and semantic misinterpretation adopted by undergraduate students when writing in English. This hypothesis could be proved by the detached relation between the sign and the referent, or in Saussure's terminology, between the signifier and the signified, in particular in translating from Chinese into English. This study included an experimental course structure, which consisted of some feasible teaching methods. These methods were applied to Basic English Writing classes investigated in the present study. They were dictionary-consulting activities, team discussions (brainstorming as a team), sentence-making activities in which signal words were used, and team writing activities, in order to improve the student's writing skills and his or her vocabulary size. Test instruments included a pretest (pre-class questionnaires) and a posttest (a midterm writing test). Targeted students were Chinese non-English majors taking Basic English Writing (BEW) classes. The students in the treatment group performed better in the posttest than those in the control group. Moreover, the students, who failed to get into the habit of consulting English dictionaries, did not perform better than those consistently consulting English dictionaries. It seems that the experimental course structure may facilitate university students' learning of how to write in English.
... Hu (2016) states that "corpora have unique advantages over dictionaries and other references since they are equipped with automatic search function capable and thus conveniently used to retrieve large amounts of linguistic data" (p.22). Overall, the use of corpora in translator training can enhance the learning process and improve the performance of trainees (Alhassan et al., 2021;Alotaibi, 2017;Beeby et al., 2009;Bernardini, 2003;Hu, 2016;Zeitoun & Dakik, 2018). ...
... Previous studies, such as Neshkovska (2019) and Monzo (2003), have explored the benefits of utilizing corpora in translation training. Bernardini (2003) recommends using parallel corpora as a source for translation tasks, as they offer valuable insights into idiomatic expressions and the use of natural language. Beeby et al. (2009) argue that corpora provide a wealth of text samples for learners to analyze and learn from, as they can address gaps in learners' knowledge. ...
This article presents a comprehensive study that delves into the untapped potential of incorporating monolingual corpora as a strategic tool within translator training to enhance trainees’ proficiency in the challenging domain of inverse translation from Arabic to English. By shedding light on the pedagogical promise of monolingual corpora in inverse translation instruction, this research underscores the critical need to integrate this tool into translator training curricula, thereby amplifying the translation competencies of trainees. The central research inquiry is as follows: How does using a monolingual corpus enhance the performance of students engaged in inverse translation of collocations from Arabic to English within the context of political and media texts? The researchers focused on two groups of female students specializing in political and media translation at the College of Language Sciences, King Saud University. These groups, a control and an experimental one, were meticulously trained with different references—while the control group relied on conventional bilingual dictionaries, the experimental group employed monolingual corpora as their primary translation references—the assessment criterion centered on translating a newspaper text. The noteworthy outcome of this comparative analysis was that the experimental group consistently outperformed their counterparts in the control group by leveraging monolingual corpora. The findings from this research offer precise guidance to enhance the efficiency of translation training programs. Moreover, the study equips translators with essential skills and competencies and elevates the quality of translation training programs.
... This conceptualization of comparable corpora differs from that used in translation studies, which refer to a principled collection of translated and non-translated texts in the same language. Comparable corpora serve as valuable resources for training translators, bridging the gap between monolingual and parallel corpora (Bernardini 2003;529). They offer advantages such as simpler corpus construction processes and a greater abundance of language resources for training. ...
This article delves into the trajectory of corpus translation studies (CTS) over the past two decades, summarizing key areas of existing research and identifying potential gaps and challenges within the field. The review encompasses various research areas, including translation universals, translator style, translation norms, and translation pedagogy. It acknowledges the valuable contributions made in these areas while also highlighting potential areas for improvement, such as the need to incorporate functional aspects in translator style research and align translation training programs with professional requirements. The review introduces (De Sutter, Gert, and Marie-Aude Lefer. 2020. “On the Need for a New Research Agenda for Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Multi-Methodological, Multifactorial and Interdisciplinary Approach.” Perspectives 28 (1): 1–23) new research agenda for CTS, which advocates for multifactorial designs, methodological pluralism, and interdisciplinarity. This agenda facilitates two analysis modes: one utilizing corpus methods to examine translation products, and the other employing diverse methods to investigate products, processes, participants, and contexts in corpus-assisted translation practices. It is argued that these two analysis modes offer valuable guidance for future corpus-assisted translation studies.
... The active involvement of learners accessing corpora for language learning refers to accessing already-made corpora via tools in order to explore, inter alia, vocabulary, grammar, collocations of words and sentence structure (Liu & Jiang 2009;Nation 2001). Several works and projects have paved the way in the field of educational use of corpora (Bernardini 2003) and, as argued by Poole, studies have shown that "not only are learners able to access authentic language use for their various target communities, they are able to do so independently in moments where such discoveries are most timely relevant and rewarding" (2022: 1623). Within research encouraging access and consultation of corpora by students (Granger 2015;Poole 2018), active corpus construction by them has received little attention (Flowerdew 2015) where this is understood to refer to students' production of corpora to enhance their lexical, writing, listening comprehension and even oral skills, but also research and collaboration skills via peer work (Baldry and Thibault 2020;Baldry and Kantz 2020;Cambria et al 2012). ...
Through first-hand experiences undertaken with students using the OpenMWS platform (Taibi 2020), the paper reports on the progress made by second-year language degree students in English linguistics at the University of Messina as regards their use of online corpus construction, annotation and search tools when exploring video genres. The paper describes the ways in which participation in the Messina OVP (Online Video Project) on schools in the British Isles during and after the Covid crisis has proved beneficial for the students in question, both in terms of acquiring textual competences and as regards creating new interactive communities (Vasta and Baldry 2020; Baldry et al 2022).
... 22-23) refers to parallel Corpora as a linguistic resource that "facilitates contrastive analysis of English and other languages, advance development in translation theory and enhance foreign language teaching". Bernardini (2003) reports the construction of CEXI (Corpus of English X Italian), a corpus that involves English and Italian original texts and their translations. This corpus was compiled mainly to teach sociocultural insights, discourse analysis, and foreign language aspects. ...
In this paper, we investigate the usage of opinion verbs in Italian as a foreign language and any errors this usage may cause, taking into account intralanguage and interlanguage factors. First of all, we analyze the frequency of opinion verb types, in a Greek corpus of native speakers and we investigate the frequency of the same type of verbs in an Italian Translator Learner Corpus compiled by the same learners. Secondly, we explore to what extent there are errors regarding the use of opinion verbs. The data will show that learners, in some cases, commit errors because of their mother tongue influence while in others they avoid using opinion verbs because of this particular lack of knowledge.
... En el año 2002 Hunston establece una clasificación de ocho tipos de corpus entre los que se encuentra el corpus en el que se basa este estudio. Este tipo de corpus sirve para dar información sobre "unidades de significado" típicas de la lengua meta o de una sección especializada de la misma (Bernardini 2003). Entre sus ventajas, Aston (1999) menciona su facilidad de uso, su función informativa, ya que proporciona cifras de densidad léxica y repetitividad en los tipos de textos incluidos en el corpus, y su utilidad como medio para aprender sobre un área en la que el traductor necesita trabajar. ...
p>The aim of this paper is to analyze the use of the term “compliance”, considered one of the most popular topics in the legal-economic field in 2017 and 2018 in the Spanish press to determine whether there is a preference for its use in English, for its translation into Spanish or for both options. A corpus methodology has been used to study the frequency of use of the term in two generalist newspapers (El País and La Vanguardia) and two specialized ones (Expansión and El Economista), during the period between January 2017 and October 2018. The results show a preference for the use of the term in English, although this trend is accentuated in the specialized press in comparison with the general press. From a terminological perspective this analysis helps develop training and the profession of the translator since it is a contribution for the acquisition of the lexical competence necessary for professional translation.</p
... A similar study has been found in relevant literature that hypothesizes that a course specially geared towards translating as a communicative activity will diminish differences between translations of university language students and those of professional translators (e.g., Dimitrova's project, 1996Dimitrova's project, -1997. Secondly, setting up multilingual parallel texts is percieved in Europe as a good investment not in the short term but in the midterm or long term for teaching translation and doing contrastive linguistic analysis, which can also reflect on teaching languages (Bernardini, 2003). The level of awareness should be raised on this issue as the responses to a related question did not indicate very high. ...
This mixed method research study aimed to highlight the problems of EFL academicians concerning their current translation practices, their attitudes towards the use of various translation tools, and offer suggestions for more quality translation practices. Seventy-three EFL academicians from three Turkish universities participated in the study. The qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaire items and analyzed with the content analysis while the quantitative data was obtained through Likert-scale items and analyzed with descriptive statistics. Based on the participants' ideas, the establishment of a translation center in the university, collaboration with professional translators with academic background and experience of professional translation in various disciplines, the organization of awareness-raising seminars, the introduction of minor and double major programs in translation and the integration of training programs facilitating the use of online translation tools and search engines were found beneficial in enhancing the quality of existing translation practices.
The availability of specialized oral material in the field of recreational flying in general and, specifically in the sub-field of hang gliding, is scarce. Therefore, in order to conduct a study of spoken English produced by non-native speakers within the international hang gliding community, it became necessary for the author to collect her own data and compile the specialized corpus she would then analyze. The process involved several phases, which began with the definition of the universal and sample populations, then the design and implementation of an interview, followed by the transcription of the recordings leading to the creation of the finalized files. This article presents a detailed description of the compilation process of this corpus-based research and covers some material which could be helpful to others pursuing or considering to embark in similar projects. It also includes some examples of preliminary findings, since it is still an ongoing project.
The present study explores the attitudes of novice teachers towards corpus-aided language learning and teaching in an undergraduate writing course for multilingual students at a large US public university. The participating instructors facilitated approximately 75 minutes of corpus training for their students and implemented 4-6 corpus activities over the course of the 16-week term. Participating instructors completed an initial survey documenting existing knowledge of, experiences with, and attitudes towards corpus-aided language learning and teaching, a second open-ended questionnaire at the mid-point of the academic term exploring their experiences, and a final instrument assessing how their attitudes had potentially evolved, either positively or negatively, and their likelihood for continued implementation of corpus-aided pedagogy in their classrooms. To offer a balanced perspective, data was also collected from three teachers who chose not to implement corpus activities in their courses. Findings display generally positive attitudes towards corpus study but also reveal emergent tensions regarding the use of ready-made corpus activities and the key affordances of discovery, authenticity, and autonomy often forwarded in support of corpus pedagogy.
As suggested by its name, corpus-assisted translation pedagogy is placed within a triangle formed by at least three distinct but not discrete disciplines: corpus linguistics, translation and pedagogy. The interdisciplinary nature of corpus-assisted approaches to translation teaching more or less dictates that their investigation should take into consideration the influences and theories of these three areas. In the past two decades, there has been an exponential increase in research studies advocating the adoption of corpora for translation teaching. This paper brings together various strands of research and development in the field of corpus-assisted translation teaching over the past two decades. It begins with an overview of corpus applications in translation research, followed by a critical review of recent research dealing with: (1) corpus-based studies in language pedagogy; (2) different types of corpora used in translation teaching; and (3) issues and debates in the application of corpora to translation teaching. The paper concludes with a discussion of areas for further research.
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