《Examples Of How I Used A Corpus In Wordsmith Tools To Tackle Translation Problems》.pdf

EXAMPLES OF HOW I USED A CORPUS IN WORDSMITH TOOLS TO TACKLE TRANSLATION PROBLEMS IN A TEXT ENTITLED “PERFIL BIOFÍSICO FETAL” I built my corpus by downloading texts from the MEDLINE database. I found English texts related to the text being translated from Spanish by searching for terms for which I was already sure of the translation. Below I explain how I used this corpus within the program “WordSmith Tools” to find the correct terms and collocations for my translation. PROBLEM 1 – USAGE – foetal or fetal // foetus or fetus This was the first thing I chose to look up, as I wanted to know which spelling was the most used in medical texts written in standard British English. This would enable me to enlarge my corpus by searching for the most standard spelling of “f(o)etal”. I had always been taught that in British English, both words were spelt with an “o”, so I wanted to check it out for myself. Although by using the British National Corpus, I would have been searching texts written in British English, these texts are not specialised, and so this would not have necessarily shown which spelling was standard in medical texts. I had already found convincing evidence that the English equivalent of “conducta fetal” was “f(o)etal behavio(u)r”. Because of the difference between the British and US spelling of “behavio(u)r”, I was able to search for the correct spelling of “f(o)etal” in specialised texts written in British English. In WordSmith Tools, I searched for “behaviour”, then ordered the concordance by the word immediately to the left (L1). As we can see in the screen shown above, there are several concordances for “fetal behaviour”, whereas there are none for “foetal behaviour”. Therefore, according to my corpus