Meaning & Usage From Context—“corpus” research-based translation & editing of specialist texts

KWIC question—an example for pre-workshop orientation

A translator said, “I’m going back and forth deciding between past tense and past perfect in this abstract. I have the feeling past perfect isn’t used much, but I feel a need for it. Is there an American influence weeding out past perfect in medical texts? Is my need from my Irish past?”

A quick KWIC (key word in context) search to look for uses of past perfect tense in a 300,000-word subspecialty medical corpus that included both British and American journal articles assured the translator that past perfect was alive and well in medical texts on both sides of the Atlantic.

But further information came out of the display. Visually discarding examples where the *ed word is an adjective (hits 13, 14 and 17 for example), there is a suggestion that past perfect may be more common in texts like case reports or retrospective case series, which tell the complex stories of individual patients (hits 18 through 23, for example). It may be less common in original research articles.

That hypothesis could be tested further if an answer were needed by an instructor or a linguist. But in just a few minutes the translator had an answer that could allow her to continue translating confidently.