RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES AND DOCUMETATION FOR TRANSLATION

The course Research Methodologies and Documentation for Translation purposes belongs to the core courses of Translation and Interpreting - Specialized Translation: Spanish - English; English - Sign Language; and Spanish - Sign Language. The course is aimed at providing students with various methodological and practical resources and tools to support translation and interpretation activities, especially in semi-specialized domains and in the use of language for specific purposes. The course sets out to explore not only existing terminological database and document repositories, but also to help students develop and feed their own terminological resources, retrieve information and specific contents to inform translation tasks as well as acquire the necessary methodological tools and metalanguage to reflect on different language combinations and the translation practice effectively.

At the end of the course students will be able to use effectively some of the main online and offline resources for information mining and terminology management, be they paper-based or in digital form; they will be able to handle several resources to acquire terminological knowledge of one or more sub-languages and domains autonomously, as required for translation purpose. Students will be able to devise, manage and evaluate simple projects in the areas of terminology and information mining. They will also be able to use the material provided by their teacher in an autonomous way and self-assess the skills and competences they have acquired during the course.

Pre-requisites of this course are a level C1 of the QCER as for the English language and an excellent competence of the Italian language. International students will need at least a level B2 of the QCER as for the Italian language, especially in terms of written language.

The course deals with a few basic concepts of information mining and terminology management. It presents a few online and offline tools and some research methods to retrieve and process information both for specialised translation and revision tasks. Core concepts of terminology and terminology management will be provided: general vs. specialized language; the concept of term; conceptual relationships; concordances, collocations and clusters, colligations and word profiles, semantic associations; corpus tools and corpus analysis. Basic concepts and examples will allow students to carry out their terminology research project work for the exam.

Mandatory readings:

Slides of the lectures, academic papers and book extracts which will be provided by the professor and uploaded on the course moodle page

Recommended reading:

Zanettin, Federico (2014) Translation-Driven Corpora. London and New York: Routledge.

The final exam will consist of two parts, a written and an oral one, which will test the students’ competence on the topics explored during the course.
Written test: Students will be asked to produce a project work and will be allowed two weeks to complete and upload it on the course moodle page. The project will consist in a short translation task (from English into Italian) that students will need to carry out and hand in together with a small corpus of comparable texts, a glossary of specialised terms and a short translation commentary in English regarding the online and offline resources that were used to tackle terminological and cultural issues.
The oral test will assess the students' acquisition of the topics covered during the course and their communicative competence at the C1+ level of the QCER. The oral part of the exam will test students’ ability to employ the metalanguage applied to information mining and terminology management. The two marks of the written and the oral part will be calculated for the final result of the exam.

Lectures, practical exercises, workshop activities, small group works, self-assessment activities.

Italian

Lectures will be held in English. Most translation examples will deal with the English-Italian language combination.

written and oral