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Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies

Translational English Corpus

TEC
 

TEC is a computerised collection of contemporary translational English text. It is freely available to the research community, with a set of software tools to allow scholars to investigate the language of translated English. The corpus is continually being enlarged and the software tools refined and made more versatile and user-friendly.

What is TEC?

TEC is a corpus of contemporary translational English: it consists of written texts translated into English from a variety of source languages, European and non-European. It was set up and is currently managed by Professor Mona Baker at the Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies. The custom-made software for processing the corpus, which is downloadable from the web, is designed by Dr. Saturnino Luz, Trinity College Dublin, who is also in charge of maintaining the corpus.

What does TEC consist of?

TEC consists of four subcorpora: fiction, biography, news and inflight magazines. The overall size of the corpus is currently around 10 million words. It can be accessed freely via the web, using a custom-built concordancer designed by Dr. Saturnino Luz.

TEC is meticulously documented in terms of extralinguistic features such as gender, nationality and occupation of the translator, direction of translation, source language, publisher of the translated text, etc. This information is held in a separate header file for each text. The concordancing software is designed to make the information in the header file available to the researcher at a glance.

What type of research does TEC support?

TEC has supported a broad range of studies in two main areas: the way in which the patterning of translated text might be different from that of non-translated text in the same language, and stylistic variation across individual translators. Examples of both types of study can be found in the Selectred Bibliography attached to this document.

Subcorpus Inflight Magazines

Subcorpus - Newspapers

Subcorpus - Biography

Subcorpus - Fiction

More fiction...

Sample Header File

TITLE
Filename: fn000009.txt
Subcorpus: Fiction
Collection: Memoirs of Leticia Valle
TRANSLATOR
Name: Carol Maier
Gender: female
Nationality: American
Employment: Lecturer
TRANSLATION
Mode: written
Extent: 55179
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Place: USA
Date: 1994
Copyright: University of Nebraska Press
Comments: Title in European Women Writers Series
TRANSLATION PROCESS
Direction: into mother tongue
Mode: written from written source text
Type: full
AUTHOR
Name: Rosa Chacel
Gender: female
Nationality: Spanish
SOURCE TEXT
Language: Spanish
Mode: written
Status: original
Place: Spain
Date: 1945

Selected Bibliograpy

Baker, Mona (1993) 'Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications', in Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 233-250.

Baker, Mona (1995) 'Corpora in Translation Studies. An Overview and Suggestions for Future Research', Target 7(2): 223-43.

Baker, Mona (1996) 'Corpus-based Translation Studies. The Challenges that Lie Ahead', in Harold Somers (ed) Terminology, LSP and Translation, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 175-86.

Baker, Mona (1998) 'Réexplorer la langue de la traduction: une approche par corpus' (Investigating the Language of Translation: A Corpus-based Approach), Meta 43(4): 480-485.

Baker, Mona (1999) 'The Role of Corpora in Investigating the Linguistic Behaviour of Professional Translators', International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4(2): 281-298.

Baker, Mona (2000) 'Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator', Target 12(2): 241-266.

Kenny, Dorothy (1997) '(Ab)normal Translations: a German-English Parallel Corpus for Investigating Normalization in Translation', in Barbara Lewandowsk-Tomaszczyk and Patrick Janes Melia (eds) Practical Applications in Language Corpora. PALC '97 Proceedings, Lódz: Lódz University Press, 387-392.

Kenny, Dorothy (1998) 'Creatures of Habit? What Translators Usually Do with Words', Meta 43(4): 515-523.

Kenny, Dorothy (1998) 'Corpora in Translation Studies', in Mona Baker (ed) Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 50-53.

Kenny, Dorothy (1998) 'Theme and Rheme in Irish and English: A Corpus-based Study', Working Papers in Language and Society, School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, 1-25.

Kenny, Dorothy (1999) 'The German-English Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts (GEPCOLT): A Resource for Translation Scholars', Teanga 18: 25-42.

Kenny, Dorothy (2000) 'Lexical Hide-and-Seek: looking for creativity in a parallel corpus', in Maeve Olohan (ed) Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome, 93-104.

Kenny, Dorothy (2000) 'Translators at Play: Exploitations of Collocational Norms in German-English Translation', in Bill Dodd (ed) Working with German Corpora, Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 143-160.

Kenny, Dorothy (2001) Lexis and Creativity in Translation: A Corpus-based Study, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Klaudy, Kinga and Krisztina Karoly (2000) 'The Text-organizing Function of Lexical Repetition in Translation¿, in Maeve Olohan (ed) Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome, 143-159.

Kohn, Janos (1996) 'What Can (Corpus) Linguistics Do for Translation', in Kinga Klaudy, José Lambert and Aniko Sohar (eds) Translation Studies in Hungary, Budapest: Scholastica, 39-52.

Laviosa, Sara (1997) 'How Comparable Can 'Comparable Corpora' Be', Target 9(2): 289-319.

Laviosa, Sara (1998) 'The English Comparable Corpus (ECC): A Resource and a Methodology', in Lynne Bowker, Michael Cronin, Dorothy Kenny and Jennifer Pearson (eds) Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Laviosa, Sara (ed) (1998) L'Approche Basée sur le Corpus/The Corpus-based Approach, Special Issue of Meta 43(4).

Laviosa-Braithwaite, Sara (1996) 'Comparable corpora: towards a corpus linguistic methodology for the empirical study of translation', in Marcel Thelen and Barbara Lewandoska-Tomaszczyk (eds) Translation and Meaning Part 3, Maastricht: UPM, 153-163.

Laviosa-Braithwaite, Sara (1997) 'Investigating Simplification in an English Comparable Corpus of Newspaper Articles', in Kinga Klaudy and Janos Kohn (eds) Transferre Necesse Est, Budapest: Scholastica, 531-540.

Mauranen, Anna (2000) 'Strange Strings in Translated Language: A Study on Corpora', in Maeve Olohan (ed) Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome, 119-141.

Olohan, Maeve and Mona Baker (2000) 'Reporting that in Translated English: Evidence for Subliminal Processes of Explicitation', Across Languages and Cultures 1(2): 141-158.

Sardinha, Berber A. P. (1997) 'Patterns of Lexis in Original and Translated Business Reports: Textual Differences and Similarities', in Karl Simms (ed) Translating Sensitive Texts: Linguistic Aspects, Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 147-153.

Stewart, Dominic (2000) 'Conventionality, Creativity and Translated Text: The Implications of Electronic Corpora in Translation', in Maeve Olohan (ed) Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome, 73-91.

Stewart, Dominic (2000) 'Poor Relations and Black Sheep in Translation Studies', Target 12(2): 205-228.

Tymoczko, Maria (1998) 'Computerized Corpora and the Future of Translation Studies', Meta 43(4): 652-659.

Ulrych, Margherita (1997) 'The impact of multilingual parallel concordancing on translation', in Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Patrick James Melia (eds) PALC '97. Practical Applications in Language Corpora, Lodz: Lodz University Press, 421-436.

Zanettin, Federico (2000) 'Parallel Corpora in Translation Studies: Issues in Corpus Design and Analysis', in Maeve Olohan (ed) Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome, 105-118.

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