The use of corpora as translation resources: A study based on a survey of Spanish professional translators

The aim of this paper is to describe the use that professional translators make of corpora as translation resources. First, we briefly review the literature on translation practitioners’ use of corpora in the contexts of both translation training and professional translation. Then we present our survey-based study, analyse the uptake of corpora among Spanish translators and describe the use of this kind of translation resource. The results show that even if corpora are not as frequently used as other kinds of resources, such as dictionaries, there are professional translators who do use corpora, in a variety of ways, in their work. Additionally, non-users do not seem entirely sceptical about corpora. Against that backdrop, translator trainers are invited to continue to report on how corpora can be used as translation resources.

Terminology and French-Spanish business translation: evaluating terminology resources for the translation of accounting documents

This article is the English version of “Terminología y traducción económica francés-español: evaluación de recursos terminológicos en el ámbito contable” by Daniel Gallego Hernández. It was not published on the print version of MonTI for reasons of space. The online version of MonTI does not suffer from these limitations, and this is our way of promoting plurilingualism.

Araknion: inducción de modelos lingüísticos a partir de corpora

El proyecto Araknion tiene como objetivo general dotar al español y al catalán de una infraestructura básica de recursos lingüísticos para el procesamiento semántico de corpus en el marco de la Web 2.0 sean de origen oral o escrito.

Multilingual extension of a temporal expression normalizer using annotated corpora

This paper presents the automatic extension to other languages of TERSEO, a knowledge-based system for the recognition and normalization of temporal expressions originally developed for Spanish. TERSEO was first extended to English through the automatic translation of the temporal expressions. Then, an improved porting process was applied to Italian, where the automatic translation of the temporal expressions from English and from Spanish was combined with the extraction of new expressions from an Italian annotated corpus. Experimental results demonstrate how, while still adhering to the rule-based paradigm, the development of automatic rule translation procedures allowed us to minimize the effort required for porting to new languages. Relying on such procedures, and without any manual effort or previous knowledge of the target language, TERSEO recognizes and normalizes temporal expressions in Italian with good results (72% precision and 83% recall for recognition).

Automatic extraction of syntactic semantic patterns for multilingual resources

In this paper we present an automatic system for the extraction of syntactic semantic patterns applied to the development of multilingual processing tools. In order to achieve optimum methods for the automatic treatment of more than one language, we propose the use of syntactic semantic patterns. These patterns are formed by a verbal head and the main arguments, and they are aligned among languages. In this paper we present an automatic system for the extraction and alignment of syntactic semantic patterns from two manually annotated corpora, and evaluate the main linguistic problems that we must deal with in the alignment process.

A reassessment of traditional lexicographical tools in the light of new corpora: sports Anglicisms in Spanish

There is no question nowadays as to the international and powerful status of English at a global scale and, consequently, as to its presence in non-English speaking countries at different levels. Linguistically speaking, English is one of the languages which have mostly influenced Spanish throughout its history and especially from the late 1960s. In this study, the impact of English on Spanish is considered in the language of sports; particularly, sports Anglicisms and false Anglicisms are analysed. Due attention is paid to the different forms that an Anglicism may adopt and to which of those forms are more widely accepted or rejected by prescriptivists and speakers at large, in the light of a contrastive analysis of their appearance in the Nuevo diccionario de anglicismos, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual.

COMENEGO (Corpus Multilingüe de Economía y Negocios): a metadiscursive analysis approach

This paper describes a stage in the COMENEGO project, which is creating comparable corpora of Business texts in order to distribute them among translation practitioners so that they can use this resource when translating economic, business or financial texts. This stage consists of discursive analysis of a pilot specialised corpus initially compiled in French and Spanish. Its textual resources are classified in different categories which need to be confirmed so that they can be useful when including them into the virtual platform which will allow users exploit the corpus and filter their searches according to their specific needs. The aim of this paper is to propose a discursive analysis approach based on the concept of ‘metadiscourse’ (Hyland, 2005).

Phrase-based statistical machine translation: explanation of its processes and statistical models and evaluation of the English to Spanish translations produced

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is an approach to Machine Translation (MT) that uses statistical models whose parameter estimation is based on the analysis of existing human translations (contained in bilingual corpora). From a translation student’s standpoint, this dissertation aims to explain how a phrase-based SMT system works, to determine the role of the statistical models it uses in the translation process and to assess the quality of the translations provided that system is trained with in-domain goodquality corpora. To that end, a phrase-based SMT system based on Moses has been trained and subsequently used for the English to Spanish translation of two texts related in topic to the training data. Finally, the quality of this output texts produced by the system has been assessed through a quantitative evaluation carried out with three different automatic evaluation measures and a qualitative evaluation based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM).