“Regular expressions” as a way of dealing with translation difficultiesа

Abstract

The paper is focused on finding ways to exploit enhanced capabilities of corpus­managers, particularly the Regex function, utilizing wildcards in queries. The basis for this study derives from the experience, by all means successful, of utilizing this resource coupled with ad­hoc corpora by inexperienced translators to overcome translation difficulties. Since not entire potential was taken advantage of, the authors suggested that more complex functions could be useful for weathered translators, who would use them not to look for linguistic data but rather check their assumptions. To test the hypothesis the researchers carried out an experiment involving two groups of translators, experienced and beginners, who were asked to provide TAP (think­aloud protocol) [Someren, Barnard, Sandberg, 1994: 1] based translations of a passage. The analysis not only covering actual solutions and operations of the informants but also extrapolating their actions to potential outcomes is backed by examples. The authors came to the conclusion that Regex is a worthy thing given good language proficiency and subject savvy of the translator. Besides, the accuracy of queries, which comes inevitably as the specialist’s language proficiency improves and has an advert effect on the efficiency of linguistic data retrieving from a corpus, will be offset by wildcards. If used expertly, regular expressions provide flexibility making up for the lack of fuzzy string search [Bast, Celikik, 2013: 2] in corpus­managers.

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