My Learning Log Week 4: Corpora and Translation

 

WEEK 4

Corpora and Translation

In the class this week, teacher starts by talking about ‘Corpora and Translation’ and ‘False Friends’. Two things are about different and variety of meanings in Thai and English.

For the lesson of Corpora and Translation, there are three types of corpora as translation resources including monolingual corpora, comparable corpora, and parallel corpus.

·       A monolingual corpus contains texts in one language only. It is used by a wide range of users for various tasks.

·   A comparable corpus is a collection of "similar" texts in different languages or in different varieties of a language.

·   A parallel corpus can be defined as a corpus that contains source texts and their translations.

All types of corpora as translation resources have indirect uses for identifying specialized terms or words that go together, learning about grammar or styles in the texts.

The use of monolingual is understanding meaning, connotation, idiom, expression in source texts and transferability of those features into target texts, avoiding problems of ‘False Friends’ (I will explain it later.), and investigating collocation and pattern.

The benefits of parallel corpora are finding equivalence in the target text and studying pattern, use and style in the target text. By the way, there are some problems and limitations of parallel corpora. First, corpus creation is time consuming and requires technical knowledge. Second, Small corpus size may affect searching capability. Third, it will be difficult to find equivalence if free translation is adopted. And fourth, Slower to process or find solutions compared to conventional sources such as dictionaries.

Another lesson is ‘False Friends’. False Friends are words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. For example, the English word ‘air’ and the Thai word ‘แอร์ (air)’ (which means air hostess, air conditioner), the English word ‘entrance’ and the Thai word ‘เอ็นทรานซ์ (entrance)’ (which means entrance examination for a university).