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Chapter 7. English and Spanish discourse markers in translation

Corpus analysis and annotation
  • Julia Lavid-López
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Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age
This chapter is in the book Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age

Abstract

The study and annotation of discourse markers (DMs) in the context of translation is a much needed and challenging task not only for descriptive translation studies, but also for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Their various meanings are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human experts. In this chapter, a methodology for the analysis and annotation of DMs is proposed, using three highly frequent DMs in English -in fact, actually and really- and their translations into Spanish as a case study. The methodology consists of an initial corpus analysis phase followed by a corpus annotation phase. The corpus analysis provides qualitative and quantitative information on the meanings of these DMs by looking at their translations in large parallel corpora. The corpus annotation phase specifies the annotation procedure, which can be generalized to other DMs and to other language pairs, and form the basis for large-scale cross-linguistic annotation of DMs.

Abstract

The study and annotation of discourse markers (DMs) in the context of translation is a much needed and challenging task not only for descriptive translation studies, but also for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Their various meanings are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human experts. In this chapter, a methodology for the analysis and annotation of DMs is proposed, using three highly frequent DMs in English -in fact, actually and really- and their translations into Spanish as a case study. The methodology consists of an initial corpus analysis phase followed by a corpus annotation phase. The corpus analysis provides qualitative and quantitative information on the meanings of these DMs by looking at their translations in large parallel corpora. The corpus annotation phase specifies the annotation procedure, which can be generalized to other DMs and to other language pairs, and form the basis for large-scale cross-linguistic annotation of DMs.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Corpus resources and tools 1
  4. Part I. Corpus resources and tools
  5. Chapter 1. Now what ? 23
  6. Chapter 2. ZHEN 49
  7. Chapter 3. Word alignment in a parallel corpus of Old English prose 75
  8. Chapter 4. Semantic textual similarity based on deep learning 101
  9. Chapter 5. TAligner 3.0 125
  10. Chapter 6. Developing a corpus-informed tool for Spanish professionals writing specialised texts in English 147
  11. Part II. Corpus-based studies and explorations
  12. Chapter 7. English and Spanish discourse markers in translation 177
  13. Chapter 8. The discourse markers well and so and their equivalents in the Portuguese and Turkish subparts of the TED-MDB corpus 209
  14. Chapter 9. Variation of evidential values in discourse domains 233
  15. Chapter 10. The translation for dubbing of Westerns in Spain 257
  16. Chapter 11. Generic analysis of mobile application reviews in English and Spanish 283
  17. Chapter 12. Exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models 307
  18. Chapter 13. Binomial adverbs in Germanic and Romance Languages 325
  19. Index 343
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.07lav

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Corpus resources and tools 1
  4. Part I. Corpus resources and tools
  5. Chapter 1. Now what ? 23
  6. Chapter 2. ZHEN 49
  7. Chapter 3. Word alignment in a parallel corpus of Old English prose 75
  8. Chapter 4. Semantic textual similarity based on deep learning 101
  9. Chapter 5. TAligner 3.0 125
  10. Chapter 6. Developing a corpus-informed tool for Spanish professionals writing specialised texts in English 147
  11. Part II. Corpus-based studies and explorations
  12. Chapter 7. English and Spanish discourse markers in translation 177
  13. Chapter 8. The discourse markers well and so and their equivalents in the Portuguese and Turkish subparts of the TED-MDB corpus 209
  14. Chapter 9. Variation of evidential values in discourse domains 233
  15. Chapter 10. The translation for dubbing of Westerns in Spain 257
  16. Chapter 11. Generic analysis of mobile application reviews in English and Spanish 283
  17. Chapter 12. Exploring variation in translation with probabilistic language models 307
  18. Chapter 13. Binomial adverbs in Germanic and Romance Languages 325
  19. Index 343
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