While there are an increasing number of electronic databases that contain large corpora potentially useful to researchers in translation studies, they come in a bewildering variety of size, coverage, reliability, and accessibility. For these and other reasons, researchers in translation studies have been slow to make use of such databases, despite the fact that corpus-based translation studies are now well established. This article seeks to explore a set of three interlocking questions regarding the usefulness of large, preexisting online corpora for research in translation studies. First, how useful are such databases for full-text searches and the compilation of corpora? Second, to what extent are privately compiled corpora now reinventing the wheel? Finally, what are the costs and benefits of using online databases versus privately compiled corpora? Through the use of a pilot study, this investigation seeks to make researchers aware of some of the major structural issues involved while working with large online databases. In particular, it is demonstrated that the purpose for which such databases were built means that, when adapting them for use in translation studies, considerable care must be taken to ensure that the researcher is aware of a wide variety of factors influencing the structure, accuracy, and usefulness of the material.
Key words
English-language corpora /
corpus studies /
OCR conversion /
corpus compilation /
online databases
{{custom_sec.title}}
{{custom_sec.title}}
{{custom_sec.content}}
References
Anderson, Kristine J. (2006). “Doing Translation History in EEBO and ECCO.” Libraries Research Publications, 74. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ lib_research/74.
Baker, Mona (1993). “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies. Implications and Applications.” In Text and Technology: In Honor of John Sinclair, ed.by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 233-250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
——— (1995). “Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research.” Target 7.2, 223-243.
de Bolla, Peter (2013). The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights. New York: Fordham University Press.
Edelstein, Dan (2016). “Intellectual History and Digital Humanities.” Modern Intellectual History 13.1, 237-246.
Gadd, Ian (2009). “The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online.”Literature Compass 6, 680-692.
Kemppanen, Hannu (2004). “Keywords and Ideology in Translated History Texts: A Corpus-Based Analysis.” Across Languages and Cultures 5.1, 89-106.
Kichuk, Diana (2007). “Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO).”Literary and Linguistic Computing 22, 291-303.
Mueller, Martion (2012). “EEBO-TCP 2012: The Future of the TCP as a Public Domain and Collaboratively Curated Corpus of Early Modern English.” Scalable Reading, 26 September. https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/?p=190. Accessed 15 November 2017.
Munday, Jeremy (2002). “Systems in Translation: A Systematic Model for Descriptive Translation Studies.” In Crosscultural Tansgressions: Research Models in Translation. Volume II: Historical and Ideological Issues, ed. by Theo Hermans, 76-92. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Neumann, Charles Fried (1831). History of the Pirates Who Infested the China Sea, from 1807 to 1810, Translated from the Chinese Original, with Notes and Illustrations. London: Oriental Translation Fund.
Poupaud, Sandra, Anthony Pym,Ester Torres Simon (2009). “Finding Translations.On the Use of Bibliographical Databases in Translation History.” Meta 54.2, 264-278.
Rovira-Esteva, Sara, Pilar Orero,Javier Franco Aixela (eds.) (2015). “Bibliometric and Bibliographical Research in Translation Studies.” Special issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 23.2, 159-160.
Shevlin, Eleanor F. (2009). “Exploring Context and Canonicity: Lessons from the ECCO and EEBO Databases.” Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 23.3, 4-13.
Shillingsburg, Peter L.(2006). From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spedding, Patrick (2011). “‘The New Machine’: Discovering the Limits of ECCO.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44.4, 437-453.
St. André, James (2018). “Consequences of the Conflation of Xiao and Filial Piety in English.” Translating and Interpreting Studies 13.2, forthcoming.
Steggle, Matthew (2014). “The Cruces of Measure for Measure and EEBO-TCP.” Review of English Studies 65.270, 438-455.
Strange, Carolyn, Daniel McNamara, Josh Wodak,Ian Wood (2014). “Mining for the Meanings of a Murder: The Impact of OCR Quality on the Use of Digitized Historical Newspapers.” Digital Humanities 8.1. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/1/000168/000168.html. Accessed 1 December 2017.
Withington, Phil (2010). Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas. Cambridge: Polity.
PDF(1348 KB)
