Impact of Parallel Corpora as Translation Memories on Phraseological Translation Quality in Student Translations of Specialized Medical Texts

Recent studies point to the benefits of corpora for translation. This includes comparable corpora. But notably parallel corpora as translation memories (TMs) integrated in a CAT tool provide an excellent means for use in the translation environment. The benefits are situated mainly on the level of terminology and phraseology. This use also adds the general benefits of TMs, i.e. translation speed and productivity as well as translation quality in terms of stylistic, terminological and phraseological consistency. However, certain error types occur more often with the use of a corpus, possibly because of overconfidence in the corpus or a lack of time when making extensive use of it. In order to assess the influence of CAT tools and preset corpus-based TMs on phraseological translation quality, we examine translations of specialized medical texts by MA students of Translation performed under three different conditions. We use an error classification for assessing predefined translation difficulties (cf. MeLLANGe error typology). Pilot test results showed the benefits of concordance searches in TMs of parallel corpora for looking up specialized medical terminology, notably for more difficult items. But also the exclusive use of external resources showed a positive influence on the translation of specialized terminology.status: publishe