Application of corpus technologies in teaching specialized translation

Research methods include the analysis of corpus-related research findings to specify corpus types, their potential and possible methods of exploiting in teaching specialized translation; the synthesis of teaching techniques in a new academic setting focused on oil and gas subject area to elaborate appropriate tasks and exercises necessary for developing translation skills at the translation training phase. The paper refers to the following types of material: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) comparable corpora of original English and Ukrainian texts compiled from Internet resources (Britannica, oil and gas company websites and journals) and DIY parallel corpora in English and Ukrainian oil and gas related source texts in English and their Ukrainian translations performed by university instructors and Master students involved in translation projects; the same types of texts processed and produced by Master students when undertaking practical training and preparing diploma papers; extracts from monolingual (Ludwig.guru) and bilingual (Reverso Context) corpus-based concordances.

technology translation industry oil gas comparative parallel

Results

The typology of text corpora is diverse as it is based on different criteria. In this paper we focus on comparable and parallel types. The former refers to sets of oil and gas related texts in English and Ukrainian which share common features. The latter include original texts in English / Ukrainian and their translation in Ukrainian / English.

Prior to elaborating the phases of teaching specialized translation, we have concretized stages and steps making up practicing translators' workflow they follow when dealing with specialized discourse and specified instances requiring corpus technology application which are as follows: source text analysis, in particular its genre characteristics; information and terminology search; target text production; editing. In the academic setting the full-scale translation project can be carried out after trainee translators acquire necessary declarative and procedural knowledge and develop appropriate skills, which suggests splitting the academic hours allotted for "Translation and Interpreting Practice” course into two phases: translation training and translation practice. In this article we'll show the application of the above-mentioned corpus types in the first phase.

From the "Web as a Corpus” perspective we consider the Internet the primary source for using corpus-based approach when raising trainee translators' awareness of a particular genre (instruction, patent, company website, academic article, technical advertisement, etc.) features; developing their skills to distinguish a subject area term and determine its collocation profile and semantic preference as it contains a wealth of subject area (in our case - oil and gas industry) texts and reference sources which are constantly updated and easily accessed. Typing a particular term in the Google search engine results in an immediate display of matches in the Google search result page where a term appears in bold in natural context. Applying this simple technique trainee translators don't need to use any special corpus processing software as the way of search result presentation is similar to that offered by concordances. For example, when dealing with "cable-tool drilling” term, the first match we can see in the Google search page is a definition provided by Oilfield Glossary: "a method of drilling whereby an impact tool or bit, suspended in the well from a steel cable, is dropped repeatedly on the bottom of the hole to crush the rock”; the second match is academic.ru translation into Russian which should be translated into Ukrainian as shock-rope drilling. Having skipped irrelevant (or partly relevant) matches referring to cable-tool drilling in making water wells, we go to the Britannica article entitled "Cable tooling” which demonstrate the term's application in the encyclopedia section related to oil well drilling and then we proceed to studying the web-page from "Oilfield team” - a website of an oilfield workers community, - which, firstly, provides the term's synonym - percussion drilling - and, secondly, its definition, an article on its modern-day application (which is an additional source of subject matter knowledge), and immediate surrounding presented by such word combinations as "repeated strikes for cable-tool drilling”, "cable tool drilling rig”, "applications for cable-tool drilling” etc. The describes technique based on applying the Internet-based monolingual comparable corpora can be implemented through the following task instructions:

1) Search the Internet for a definition of cable-tool drilling”;

2) Surf the Internet to find synonyms of "cable- tool drilling”;

3) Look through the Google result page matches and highlight those which are relevant / irrelevant to your search;

4) Search the Internet for word combinations comprising "cable tool” etc.

Dealing with collocations - commonly used word combinations - is another difficulty trainee translator frequently encounter. This issue mainly refers to translating specialized texts from Ukrainian into English. When creating the target texts students may have doubts whether a particular collocation, which seems to be semantically acceptable and grammatically correct, sounds natural in English texts belonging to a certain genre. Referring to monolingual resource Ludwig.guru containing extracts from the authentic media (Encyclopedia Britannica, BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times - Science / Tech, Research Policy, Science Magazine, The Economist, Independent, etc.) can help to solve this translation problem. Thus, "perform drilling operations” has proved to be a commonly used phrase as evidenced by at least 5 text fragments from Forbs, Petroleum Science, Huffington Post, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, and Planetary and Space Science, in which it is used both in Active and Passive Voice.

When translating complex noun constructions, verbal phrases, and abbreviations trainee translators can make use of the following corpus-based resources:

1) parallel text extracts provided by Reverso Context resource and

2) the linguistic material provided by DIY bilingual parallel corpora, which we suggest compiling from the English / Ukrainian source texts and corresponding Ukrainian / English target texts created by university instructors and Master students involved in translation projects; the same types of texts processed and produced by Master students when undertaking practical training and preparing diploma papers.

For example, typing the query "petroleum production” in the search field of Reverso Context resulti in a number of English- Russian parallel text fragments containing "petroleum production” in the left-hand English section and "добыча нефти” in the right-hand Russian one. This example also demonstrates the resource's drawback that is lack of the Ukrainian version, due to which trainee translators have to perform additional translation from Russian into Ukrainian or vice versa.

The above-mentioned resources are also useful for analyzing translations techniques and transformations applied by both professional and high-performance trainee translators. The appropriate tasks can be as follows:

1) Look through the source and target texts and find the instances of addition / omission / transposition / substitution. Explain the reasons for their application.

2) Look through the source and target texts, identify lexical transformations and comment on their application.

Conclusions

The study conducted in this paper has shown possible applications of comparable and parallel corpora in teaching English- Ukrainian oil and gas area related translation at the translation training phase. Further research should be aimed at integrating corpus-based tasks into the translation practice stage involving the implementation of a translation project.

References

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