Using Specialized Monolingual Corpus in Translating Political Texts: A pilot study

Abstract

In recent years, electronic corpora have played a crucial role in different areas of linguistics such as language learning and teaching, lexicography, translation and many others. It is suggested that exploiting monolingual as well as bilingual corpora can help translators (whether human or machine) to a high degree. This paper tries to show the effectiveness of a specialized monolingual corpus in translating various collocations usually found in political texts from English into Persian by a translation trainee. This interesting experiment compares the accuracies of collocation translation using conventional resources (e.g. monolingual as well as bilingual dictionaries) and a specialized monolingual corpus. The results show how the quality of translation by a would-be translator can be improved using corpus-based translation tools. Concretely, the present experiment demonstrates a 51.3% improvement in finding correct equivalents when a specialized monolingual corpus is used as translation aid as opposed to monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.