Parallel Corpora for Medical Translation Training: An Analysis of Impact On Student Performance

A number of studies have argued for and shown the usefulness of parallel corpora for supporting specialized translation and translation training (e.g. Kübler 2011, Bowker 2011). More specifically, corpora are claimed to be a valuable resource to search for informative examples of how domain-specific expressions should be translated. However, the uptake of corpora among professional translators has been rather slow, mainly because relevant corpora were often difficult to obtain and came in formats that required additional software to be consulted (Bernardini 2006). Recently, two developments have alleviated these problems considerably: First, the open data movement has resulted in more specialized corpora being made publicly available online. Secondly, thanks to the standardization of formats for language resources, parallel corpora are now also made available in the TMX-format that can be easily imported in a CAT tool so that a parallel corpus can be used as translation memory. In this study we assess the usefulness of a parallel corpus for medical translation and more specifically for the translation of patient information leaflets (PIL). As a corpus we use the Dutch and English versions of the PILs made available by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and compiled as a sentence-aligned parallel corpus in TMX-format by Tiedemann 2009 (13.3M words). As part of their medical translation training, a group of MA students is instructed to translate a new PIL from English into their mother tongue Dutch. Half of the group is given access to the corpus and the other half is not. The translation quality of the condition and control groups is then compared on the basis of a number of preselected linguistic items. References Bernardini, S. (2006). Corpora for translator education and translation practice: achievements and challenges. In Proceedings of LREC 2006 (5th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference), PARIS, ELRA, 2006 (pp. 17 – 22). Bowker, L. (2011). Off the record and on the fly. In A. Kruger, K. Wallmach & J. Munday (Eds.) Corpus-based Translation Studies: Research and Applications (pp. 211-236). London/New York: Continuum. Kübler, N. (2011). Working with different corpora in translation teaching. In A. Frankenberg-Garcia, L.Flowerdew & G. Aston (Eds.) New Trends in Corpora and Language Learning (pp. 62-80). London: Continuum. Tiedemann, J. (2009). News from OPUS - A Collection of Multilingual Parallel Corpora with Tools and Interfaces. In N. Nicolov, K. Bontcheva, G. Angelova & R. Mitkov (Eds.) Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (Vol. V) (pp. 237-248). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.status: publishe