USING CORPORA IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL TRANSLATION TRAINING: RESOURCES TO IDENTIFY CONVENTIONALITY AND PROMOTE CREATIVITY

Abstract Since the first Corpus Use and Learning to Translate (CULT) Conference in Bertinoro (Italy) in 1997, the usefulness of corpora for translators and trainee translators has been highlighted. From an initial approach where translators compiled ad hoc corpora in their hard drive for a subsequent study with lexical analysis software, there emerged a new trend towards the use of the Internet as corpus. In this second approach, the Web is perceived as a huge corpus which is accessed by means of online tools which produce monolingual wordlists and concordances from texts available from the Internet or pre-existing corpora, or by means of bilingual or multilingual concordancers displaying aligned texts from international institutions’ parallel corpora. Bilingual concordancers and translation memories are widely used by translators and trainee translators because of the immediate translation solutions they offer, but these tools can restrain creativity by offering conventional solutions and eliminating layout and multimodal elements in texts. The aim of this article is to describe the exploitation of quality corpora in a scientific and technical translation course, focusing on texts on health translated from English into Spanish, and on terminological variation as a reflection of creativity in language.

摘要 自1997年在意大利贝尔蒂诺罗举办首届语料库应用与翻译学习（Corpus Use and Learning to Translate, CULT）学术会议以来，语料库对于译者及实习译者的实用价值已得到广泛凸显。从最初译者在本地硬盘临时编译定制语料库、借助词汇分析软件开展后续研究的初始模式，学界逐渐涌现出以互联网作为语料库的全新研究趋势。在此第二种研究路径中，万维网被视作巨型语料库，可通过两类在线工具获取相关资源：一类工具可从互联网公开文本或现有语料库中提取单语词表（monolingual wordlists）与语料库索引行（concordances）；另一类为双语或多语语料库索引工具（bilingual or multilingual concordancers），可展示国际机构平行语料库（parallel corpora）中的对齐文本。双语语料库索引工具与翻译记忆库（translation memories）因可即时提供翻译解决方案，被译者与实习译者广泛使用，但这类工具往往会因提供常规化译法、剔除文本中的版式与多模态元素，而抑制译者的创作性。本文旨在阐述科技翻译课程中优质语料库的应用实践，研究聚焦于从英语译为西班牙语的健康领域文本，并以术语变异作为语言创造性的体现展开分析。