Using Small Parallel Corpora to Develop Collocation-Centred Activities in Specialized Translation Classes

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Published: Dec 1, 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lincu-2016-0012
Keywords:
collocation phraseology specialised translation translator training parallel corpora translation pedagogy classroom activities for translators

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Sorina Postolea
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania
Teodora Ghivirigă
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Abstract

The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized translation classes tend to focus primarily on one-word or multi-word terminological units. However, a very important part in the making of specialist registers and texts is played by specialised collocations, i.e. relatively stable word combinations that do not designate concepts but are nevertheless of frequent use in a given field of activity. This is why helping students acquire competences relative to the identification and processing of collocations should become an important objective in specialised translation classes. An easily accessible and dependable resource that may be successfully used to this purpose is represented by corpora and corpus analysis tools, whose usefulness in translator training has been highlighted by numerous studies. This article proposes a series of practical, task-based activities-developed with the help of a small-size parallel corpus of specialised texts-that aim to raise the translation trainees′ awareness of the collocations present in specialised texts and to provide suggestions about their processing in translation.

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How to Cite
Postolea, S., and T. Ghivirigă. “Using Small Parallel Corpora to Develop Collocation-Centred Activities in Specialized Translation Classes”. Linguaculture, vol. 7, no. 2, Dec. 2016, pp. 53-72, doi:10.1515/lincu-2016-0012.
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Vol. 7 No. 2 (2016)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biographies

Sorina Postolea, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Sorina Postolea, PhD, is an assistant lecturer at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi. She also holds a Master’s Degree in translation studies (English-French) and a BA in French-English studies (French-English) from the same institution. She has presented papers in several conferences and scientific events home and abroad and she has carried out research missions in the field of applied linguistics at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) and the University of Genoa (Italy). She is particularly interested in translation studies, terminology, contrastive and corpus linguistics, and discourse studies.

Teodora Ghivirigă, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Teodora Ghivirigă is an associate professor at the Faculty of Letters within the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, the Department of Modern Languages. She currently teaches Terminology, English Grammar (Morphology), Semantics and translation. She has published a volume on the formation of the terminology of Economics in Romanian and a number of articles on the terminology and translation of texts on Economics and also corpus based studies on research articles written by non-native (Romanian) authors. She is also interested in English (British mainly) literature for children and in fantasy, especially in the works of the authors of the Inkling group.

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