7 July 2006, 10.00 – 16.30 h

Generalist translators or editors can extend their range into specialist knowledge fields by basing their new texts on insights gleaned from “corpora” or text collections that can be set up quickly for systematic analysis. Even specialists can gain a deeper understanding of language variation from studying context in a well-constructed target-genre corpus.

Meanwhile, undisciplined research, can lead to lost time as we wander down garden paths. More importantly, it can trick us into register violations, shifts in tone and voice, a patchwork style or even plagiarism or real error. This workshop will treat corpus research from the point of view of the “wordface” worker rather than that of the applied linguist.

Purpose
To raise awareness of how we use Internet and other sources of exemplary texts for research. To introduce approaches and tools that give us richer information for making decisions about meaning and usage based on context. 

Description
We will look at 3 Internet or computer-based tools that can help us approach specialist texts with greater confidence: online corpus resources; tools for creating your own specialist search engine, and linguistic analysis freeware for processing subspecialty corpora. We’ll give you our own subspecialty corpus that we’ve created for medicine—and we’ll teach you how to create your own for another subspecialty related to your own interests.

This workshop—which will take place in an air-conditioned computer lab made available to us in the seaside town of Canet de Mar—will start with a brief look at how we learn from the Internet itself and introduce WebCorp applications that allow the whole internet to be treated as a linguistic object. We’ll then move on to more specialist tools.

The workshop will be organized into 4 parts:

1) The whole Internet through WebCorp (http://www.webcorp.org.uk/), a relatively new kind of search engine based on a perception of the entire web as a corpus that can be mined using a tool from the field of applied linguistics for producing outputs in the form of useful “concordances” and collocate lists.
2) Personal, field-specific search engine creation through Rollyo or similar tools.
3) Subspecialty text analysis—through the freeware AntConc program (http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html)—the easiest and best tool we’ve found for analyzing our corpus.
4) Creation of a subspecialty target-genre corpus—how to choose and prepare texts for analyzing with AntConc or similar programs.

Examples and practice tasks will be part of all phases of the workshop and participants will go away with tools they can use immediately.

Coffee will be served at breaks. We’ll have lunch together at a nearby restaurant (included in the workshop fee).

Who should attend
Anyone doing serious specialty translation or editing in any field who is interested in honing research skills. Medical text editors or translators interested in working with our medical text corpus. Teachers of English for Specific Purposes interested in assuring complete, updated coverage of specialist language in their classes.

Outcome skills
You’ll know how to use WebCorp and understand the types of questions you can answer with it. You’ll have your own specialty search engine created during the workshop and know how to access it from home and use it while working. You’ll go away with our own medical specialty corpus and know how to analyze such a resource in the concordancing program AntConc. You’ll have started to create your own subspecialty corpus and know how to enlarge it at home.

Pre-meeting information
Web searching

The links in the description above will give you an idea of what WebCorp and Rollyo involve. We will be providing tasks to assure you’re working confidently with the tools we present and see how they fit into your work.

The corpus linguistics approach

Take a look at this example of informal “quick research questions.” A translator was able to answer quickly by using a simple “KWIC”—key word in context—output from the AntConc program.

A taste of how an instructor in English for Academic Purposes can use corpus linguistics tools to talk about word usage to advanced language students—such as our author/clients often are—can be found on Tim Johns’ home page: http://www.eisu.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/timeap3.htm#revision

About the developers

Ailish Maher, a freelance translator, has a first degree in Business and a master's degree in Translation Studies. She also holds the Institute of Linguist's Diploma in Translation and is a member of the Irish Translator's and Interpreters' Association.
e-mail: gaebolga@gmail.com

Mary Ellen Kerans, a specific-purposes English instructor, biomedical translator and author’s editor, received her MA in TESOL. She is the MET council chair.
e-mail: METworks@gmail.com