Dr Maria Kunilovskaya, University of Wolverhampton

Linguistic Resources in Practical Translation

4/6.11.20

This is a two-part hands-on session designed to introduce a range of freely available corpus-based tools and online resources that can be useful to address some of the most typical problems in human translation and in text generation at large. The session will open with the results of the survey offered to the EMTTI 2020 students to explore their interests and technical competence and to fine-tune the content of the Special Seminar to their needs. I will highlight the cognitive affinity between translation process and corpus use, and the typical problems in practical translation that can be solved with corpora. The main part of the session will cover some basic corpus linguistic terms and demonstrate several online query interfaces. Most of this part of the session is designed to allow shadowing to facilitate “learning-by-doing” approach in education.
The second part of this session provides details on more sophisticated types of queries, but mostly it is a follow-up on the few practical assignments offered for independent study. The session aims to provide working query skills to entice further research into using corpora and to whet your appetite for more.

Suggested background reading:

Thomas, James: Discovering English with Sketch Engine: A Corpus-Based Approach to Language Exploration. 2nd ed. Brno: Versatile, 2016. 228 pp. (Reviewed in Kunilovskaya, Maria and Kovyazina, Marina (2017). Sketch Engine: a toolbox for linguistic discovery. In Journal of Linguistics,  Slovak Academy of Sciences, Vol 68, No 3, 503-507. DOI: 10.2478/jazcas-2018-0005. https://www.sketchengine.eu/wp-content/uploads/Sketch_Engine_Toolbox_2017.pdf)

Speaker’s bio

Maria Kunilovskaya has been engaged in translator education for more than 10 years in her role as an Associate Professor in Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of Tyumen, Russia. Lecturing in Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Text Linguistics, she has also been involved with teaching practical translation classes. She is a strong believer in promoting practical corpus skills that can be immediately applied in everyday activities of a language professional. Her research interests include construction and exploitation of parallel corpora, corpus-based research into translation competence and translationese, most recently with a strong pull towards the computational research methods, especially in the area of human translation quality estimation.