© Marta Gómez Palou, Ottawa, Canada, 2006 A guide through the unknown: using corpora to translate into a non-native dialect Marta Gómez Palou New Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies Tarragona, Spain, 21 October 2006

Outline Key definitions Project conception Methodology  Study 1  Study 2 Conclusion

Key definitions Corpus: “large collection of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form according to a specific set of criteria” (Bowker and Pearson 2002: 9) Dialect: in the context of this thesis, a language variety, such as French Canadian or Argentinean Spanish Non-native dialect: dialect which one does not grow up speaking

CONCEPTION

Mental Process Globalization + Localization + Lack of translators + Complexification of the translation process … non-native dialect translation? Advantages Possible? Maybe with corpora? Why corpora?

METHODOLOGY

2 goals, 2 studies, 2 lit reviews Assess the usefulness and advantages (if any) of using corpora to study dialects. Test their helpfulness for translators translating into a non-native dialect.

Limitations Language/dialect: Buenos Aires Spanish and peninsular Spanish Dialectal characteristics: morphosyntactic and not lexical or phonetic Corpora: self-compiled, size Source texts: unequal Participants: volunteers

Study 1: Reference Books vs. Corpora Nature of the experiment: Take the linguistic characteristics of a given dialect as described in textbooks and investigate their presence in a monodialectal corpus of that same dialect, as well as their absence in a monodialectal corpus of another dialect. Linguistic descriptions review:  Alvar (1996) Manual de dialectología hispánica: el español de América  Fontanella de Weinberg (1987) El español bonaerense: cuatro siglos de evolución lingüística (1992) El español de América (2004) El español de la Argentina y sus variedades regionales  Lipski and Iglesias Recuerdo (1996) El español de América  Placer (2003) ¿Los argentinos hablan español?  Vaquero de Ramírez (1996) El español de América

Description of Buenos Aires Spanish: Compiling a monodialectal corpus:  Scope: specialized, not highly, not culturally bound > popularized IT texts  Channel: written  Linguistic quality: professional  Publication date: recent  Pre-processing: TreeTagger Articles from the supplement Informática 2.0 in the Clarín journal. June 05 – May 06, 126 texts, words. Identifying peninsular Spanish and Argentinean reference corpora: CREA Analysing the corpora 1. Voseo4. Use of le as pl. pron. 2. Pl. existential haber5. Nouns with ambiguous gender 3. V number variation passive constructions (se) 6. Dequeísmo and queísmo

Results Additional observations  Characteristics described in textbooks are not equally representative of this dialect in authentic texts.  The normative counterparts of non-normative characteristics are more popular in the corpus. VoseoConfirmedLe (pl)Tentative support Pl. Existential haberUnconfirmedAmbiguous genderConfirmed V number variation passives Tentative support Dequeísmo Queísmo Tentative negative Confirmed

Two groups of translators (Agua and Fuego)  All native speakers of peninsular Spanish Two source texts to translate  From En/Fr into Buenos Aires Spanish Two types of resources  Conventional (dictionaries, ref books, Web)  Monodialectal Buenos Aires corpus (Clarín) Procedure  Agua translate ST1 with corpus, ST2 with conv. res.  Fuego translate ST1 with conv. res. and ST2 with corpus Study 2: Translation experiment

Preparatory work  Selecting the subject field, corpus and corpus analysis tool  Selecting the participants  Selecting the source texts  Selecting the conventional resources  Preparing a WordSmith Tools tutorial  Preparing translators and evaluator’s information packages Execution

Quantitative Results General Qualitative Results  Verbal: improvement of voseo  Lexical:  Phraseological: no comments # OF SCORESWITHOUT CORPUSWITH CORPUS Inadequate41 Mostly adequate99 Adequate36 TOTAL16 SolutionWithoutWith Buenos Aires7 (58%) Peninsular5 (42%)2 (17%) Neutral0 (0%)3 (25%) Total12 (100%)

CONCLUSION

Assessment Modifications  Scale up and deepen the experiments (bigger corpus, more participants, more detailed tagger, etc. )  Organize the translation experiment on-site  Minimize “open” questions in questionnaires  Give participants more training in tools and corpus use Further Work  Extend to new dialects  Reverse the experiment (Buenos Aires >> peninsular Spanish)  Cover different register and subjects  Factor the impact of familiarity with the non-native dialect  Look into lexical differences  …

Conclusion Corpora have proved useful for empirical investigation of dialectal linguistic characteristics. Tentative results point that corpus-based resources could be useful to translate into a non-native dialect. More research is needed. - Thanks for your attention!