A Class in Corpora

The YTI organises regular events focussing on translation and interpreting as well as social events that are a great way to meet other people working in these fields. I have been a member of the YTI and ITI since becoming a student at the University of Leeds and have found their events very beneficial. My post today is about one of the interesting events I have been lucky enough to attend thanks to the YTI: On Saturday 28 January I attended an event to learn more about corpora. The speaker at this event was Dr. Ana Frankenberg-Garcia from the University of Surrey and she gave us a great interactive presentation and workshop which was not to be missed.

I’ll admit that I had previously avoided approaching the topic of corpora, feeling that it seemed boring and outdated, but Ana definitely proved its uses and I’ve since been very pleased to start putting her tips into use for my interpreting preparation! Little did I know that I’d actually been using Parallel Corpora all this time in the form of Linguee and ReversoContext.

During the event we learnt about the tool Sketch Engine and how to use it to help find suitable collocations which can be very useful from a translation perspective. Of course, this is not the only use of Sketch Engine that we discovered; the tool can also be used to create your very own corpora by uploading texts. However, you need to be careful what texts you select as they should not contain errors, otherwise your corpora won’t be accurate or useful.

Also, if you are interested in linguistics or learning a new language then corpora tools can also be helpful to get concordances or word lists from texts. You can even build your own thesaurus with a bit of training and playing around with the site, or create word lists. The advantage of this is that Sketch Engine can also be combined with SDL Trados as a plug-in to help your translation process. I’ve not yet tried this myself but I think it could prove useful for a big project to ensure consistency.

An example of using the tool:

The word list is what interests me most as an interpreter. You can put a text into the site and compare this to pre-existing corpora in order to create a list of exceptionally frequent words. I’ve now used this to help prepare for interpreting at the Geneva International Model United Nations at the end of March. The advantage of this software is that you can generate a glossary by putting texts into Sketch Engine and conducting a comparison. If for example you get a 1000-odd-page document one day before an interpreting assignment then you can generate a list of terms to look up very quickly and save time to read the most important part of the documents instead of pouring over 1000 pages trying to find which terms are the most likely to come up. I think this has real potential as a tool to help with interpreting preparation.

Ana did mention other tools which are free that can be used for corpora however these all have their own quirks and are all different. Personally, I can’t comment on them yet as I’ve only used Sketch Engine, but I will definitely check them out once my free trial expires to decide what tool I prefer. So far I have had a very good experience of using Sketch Engine and would like to thank Ana for her great presentation and useful tips about how to make the most of this tool. I think it has a lot of potential, especially for interpreting preparation so I would definitely advise you to try it out!