CORPUS TECHNIQUES FOR SPECIALIZED TEXTS TRANSLATION: DECONSTRUCTING COMPLEXITY FOR TRANSLATOR TRAINEES

Abstract

Language corpora are a powerful tool not only for philologists and researchers, but also for translators and applied linguists. Their use opens up new, previously unknown opportunities for more effective and in-depth linguistic research and more accurate and faster work while translating and editing texts. However, the productivity of corpus tools directly depends on «corpus literacy», i.e. the range of knowledge about corpora, their types, features, and capabilities, as well as practical «corpus skills», and, last but not least, on mastery of the coding basics for solving linguistic tasks, in particular for constructing queries in Python or with the help of CQL. It follows that the effectiveness of corpus research or its use is dependent not only on philological or translation competence, but also on specific knowledge and skills directly related to the technical side of dealing with corpora. When it comes to training future translators, especially if they do not have the technical skills to work with corpora yet, their use can become an obstacle to acquiring the necessary skills, both translational and applied. To prevent such problems, it is important to realize that corpus skills, similar to translation skills, must be acquired gradually, from simple to more complex, and that the ability to work with a corpus must be improved step by step, just like translation skills. This rather complex interdependent process requires a well-thought-out strategy for presenting the teaching material, which is often not straightforward and needs flexibility in changing and applying different methods, depending on the initial knowledge and skills of the philology students. The article offers a deeper look at a comprehensive approach to teaching professional translation, given that linguistics students often lack the skills and abilities to work with corpora. A step-by-step guidelines for working with specialized texts using corpora is proposed, which allows not only to teach students the basics of translating highly specialized texts, but also to develop their skills in working with corpora, the correct use of built-in corpus tools, and the implementation of accurate and effective search queries using corpus language. Particular attention is paid to the interconnection between specialized translation training and the translation of subject-specific vocabulary, as well as professionally oriented work with language corpora.