[Corpora-List] (continued)

[Andrea Mulloni]

Lou is theoretically correct, but...

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.

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.

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.

As far as Dan Melamed's assertion about absence of meaning: if it  
were really so, what are we all doing here?

Just my two pennies.


Andrea

Andrea Mulloni
part-time PhD Student
University of Wolverhampton

---

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".



On 19 Aug 2008, at 12:19, Lou Burnard wrote:

> Lou (who really shouldn't post to public lists before having had his
> second coffee of the day) says "Sadly, none of [the language-teaching]
> community seems to have seen fit (yet) to contribute to the present
> discussion. "
>
> Geoffrey Williams is very definitely a member of that community,  
> and so
> I believe is Dr Louw. Apologies to both for misrepresenting their
> respective allegiances.
>
> I stand by my assertion that the debate hasn't taken fully into  
> account
> the transformative effects of corpora and corpus-methods in that
> specific discipline though.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora

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