Several years ago, I had several discussions with a translator who
wanted to be able to identify "phrases" in the source text. He was
unhappy with terminology and segment-based translation aids. But, he
went beyond collocations as they have been discussed in the linguistic
literature to phrases such as "One of the lessons learnt is". He felt
that in his translating, he frequently stock phrases that he wanted to
translate the same way, but he had no mechanism for keeping track of
them, particularly when the phrase was not exact, but rather included
some variable positions. His idea was that there would be a dictionary
of these types of phrases (which would include terminological phrases,
collocations, and whole text segments), where some sort of engine
(perhaps in Word) would identify and highlight all instances that could
be handled, leaving only those passages still remaining to be translated.
Ken
TadPiotr wrote:
> Let me even generalize it a bit: the real problem in translation is with
> collocations, to which compounds belong. Dictionaries -- and databases -- of
> technical terms focus on lexicalized items, but not on the gray area of
> collocations. There are very few dictionaries of technical collocations. And
> that is one of the reasons why translations of technical texts are so
> "unnatural".
-- Ken Litkowski TEL.: 301-482-0237 CL Research EMAIL: ken@clres.com 9208 Gue Road Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA Home Page: http://www.clres.com
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