Translator-oriented, corpus-driven technical glossaries: the case of cooking terms

Abstract

Although there are many English–Portuguese technical glossaries on the market, very few are designed to meet the specific needs of translators, whose main task is the production of an idiomatic text either in the mother tongue or in the foreign language. For that purpose, a mere list of monolexical terms (usually based on previous compilations or abstract conceptual schemata, and their equivalents) will not suffice. Most importantly, the producer of a text needs to know how a word is used in context, and this can be inferred from the observation of authentic examples. Corpus Linguistics has proved to be an invaluable tool in retrieving technical terms and phraseologies from corpora. In this paper, we employ a corpus-based methodology or, more precisely, the ‘corpus-driven approach’, to compile a bilingual, monodirectional English–Portuguese glossary of cooking terms ( Teixeira and Tagnin, 2008 ), covering the various stages of the project, with an emphasis on the identification of candidate terms, and their subsequent validation through the generation of frequency and keyword lists using the lexical analysis software, WordSmith Tools.