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

Abstract The implementation of parallel corpora (source texts and their corresponding translations) as translation memories (TMs) in translation practice is widespread. This implementation may have different effects with regard to translation quality on stylistic, phraseological and terminological levels. In order to analyse these effects we conducted a small-scale experiment with 14 students from the English Translation Workshop: Translating Scientific/Medical Texts at KU Leuven. The students translated two short patient information leaflets (PILs) containing pre-selected phraseological test items (e.g. lexical collocations, grammatical collocations, complex prepositions, etc.) from English into Dutch. 6 students used a CAT tool (SDL Trados Studio) with two specialized TMs and/or any available external resources, whereas 8 students used external resources only. Afterwards the translations were error annotated. The results showed that TM use speeds up the translation process. The CAT tool users in the experiment heavily relied on the TMs they had at their disposal. The lowest number of phraseological errors was generated using a TM in combination with external resources. The most popular bilingual resources among all students were bilingual dictionaries and corpus-based resources (e.g. Linguee). If deemed necessary by the students, the TM translations were overruled to create more concise or idiomatic translations. It is important that a critical stance is taken with regard to TM quality and students also need to be made aware of the possibilities additional resources (e.g. corpora) in translation have to offer.Article submitted on 28 February 2019 (28-02-2019)edition: 2019status: publishe