Special section: processing of semantic information

 

Spoken to Spoken vs. Spoken to Written: Corpus Approach to Exploring Interpreting and Subtitling

 

Mikhail Mikhailov, Hannu Tommola, and Nina Isolahti

 

School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies of the University of Tampere, Finland (e–mail: mikhail.mikhailov@uta.fi, hannu.tommola@uta.fi, nina.isolahti@uta.fi).

 

Manuscript received March 7, 2010.
Manuscript accepted for publication May 31, 2010.

 

Abstract

The need for corpora of interpreting discourse in translation studies is gradually increasing. The research of AV translation is another rapidly developing sphere, thus corpora of subtitling and dubbing would also be quite useful. The main reason of the lack in such resources is the difficulty of obtaining data and the inevitability of manual data input. An interpreting corpus would be a collection of transcripts of speech in two or more languages with part of the transcripts aligned. The subtitling and dubbing corpora can be designed using the same principles. The structure of the corpus should reflect the polyphonic nature of the data. Thus, markup becomes extremely important in these types of corpora. The research presented in this paper deals with corpora of Finnish–Russian interpreting discourse and subtitling. The software package developed for processing of the corpora includes routines specially written for studying speech transcripts rather than written text. For example, speaker statistics function calculates number of words, number of pauses, their duration, average speech tempo of a certain speaker.

Key words: Interpreting, subtitling, corpora, Russian language, Finnish language.

 

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