REVISITING CORPUS CREATION AND ANALYSIS TOOLS FOR TRANSLATION TASKS

Abstract Many translation scholars have proposed the use of corpora to allow professional translators to produce high quality texts which read like originals. Yet, the diffusion of this methodology has been modest, one reason being the fact that software for corpora analyses have been developed with the linguist in mind, which means that they are generally complex and cumbersome, offering many advanced features, but lacking the level of usability and the specific features that meet translators’ needs. To overcome this shortcoming, we have developed TranslatorBank, a free corpus creation and analysis tool designed for translation tasks. TranslatorBank supports the creation of specialized monolingual corpora from the web; it includes a concordancer with a query system similar to a search engine; it uses basic statistical measures to indicate the reliability of results; it accesses the original documents directly for more contextual information; it includes a statistical and linguistic terminology extraction utility to extract the relevant terminology of the domain and the typical collocations of a given term. Designed to be easy and intuitive to use, the tool may help translation students as well as professionals to increase their translation quality by adhering to the specific linguistic variety of the target text corpus.