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<div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Lou is theoretically correct, but... </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">There is a whole lot of translators and interpreters out there that claim to be using corpus linguistics as a translation aid, but in fact they just use concordancers as a fall back solution to missing dictionary entries. They don't really know what corpus linguistics is about.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">The fact is - and being originally a translator myself, I feel obliged to do a little bit of self-criticism here - that translators and language teachers are not yet able to recognize the real boundaries and potential of computational linguistics, often using corpus linguistics terminology as a mere embellishment of their CVs. So no, I don't think everyday translators really make (proper) use of corpus linguistics. My BA thesis in translation and interpreting dealt with a really really basic introduction to corpus linguistics and its use in translation studies, and that was considered a quite good job back then. Looking back at it now, I realize how little I knew about the interaction of language and computers and how much mathematics can actually contribute to the description of a language.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">On the other side, I think that corpus linguistics can very well be of help to computational linguists. Yorick mentioned the WAC initiative. Any corpus linguist would probably ask questions about the representativity of the corpus, which we computational linguists often take as granted. We often think that numbers and source compatibility suffice, but implementing representativity is much more difficult than that. And we all know how important a well-balanced corpus is to a computational linguist. So here you have it, language engineering is like apples: you never throw away anything.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">As far as Dan Melamed's assertion about absence of meaning: if it were really so, what are we all doing here?</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Just my two pennies.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Andrea </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Andrea Mulloni</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">part-time PhD Student</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">University of Wolverhampton</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">---</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">That was a hard test Marcie. I didn't know if it was an essay test, True or False, or multiple choice. I just put down "Not Guilty". </font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p><div><div>On 19 Aug 2008, at 12:19, Lou Burnard wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Lou (who really shouldn't post to public lists before having had his<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">second coffee of the day) says "Sadly, none of [the language-teaching]<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">community seems to have seen fit (yet) to contribute to the present<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">discussion. "</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Geoffrey Williams is very definitely a member of that community, and so<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I believe is Dr Louw. Apologies to both for misrepresenting their<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">respective allegiances.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I stand by my assertion that the debate hasn't taken fully into account<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the transformative effects of corpora and corpus-methods in that<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">specific discipline though.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Corpora mailing list</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:Corpora@uib.no">Corpora@uib.no</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora">http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora</a></div> </blockquote></div><br></body></html>