Linguodidactic potential of corpus technologies within teaching proverb-translation features

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Zaporizhzhia National University

Linguodidactic potential of corpus technologies within teaching proverb-translation features

Stepanov V. V.

Annotation

lingvodidactic translation language proverbs

The given article reveals in details aspects of engaging corpus technologies with a powerful linguodidactic potential (concordancer, parallel, reference and virtual corpora) in university students' learning peculiarities of proverb translation. A brief description list of advantages and disadvantages of using the above-mentioned technologies in teaching language and translation in general as well as in teaching proverb-translation features in particular is reproduced in the article for constructing an instructor's strategy. An own strategy for proverb-translation teaching is covered by the author from theoretical and practical perspectives. The theoretical point provides rendering proverbs by tools regarded as a single combination of used translation techniques (derived from ideas by V.S. Vinogradov: full, partial, loan, pseudo-proverb and descriptive equivalents) and kept equivalence levels (derived from ideas by V.N. Komissarov: first, second, third, fourth and fifth equivalence levels). The practical point is considered as a single fusion of employed corpus resources -- concordancer (a program or program tool generating a concordance, namely a total list of searched- unit usage cases within corpus contexts) as well as parallel (a contrastive set of source and target texts), reference (a standard- vocabulary corpus of a certain language that comprises texts of different themes: from TV and radio broadcasting texts to fiction ones) and vitrtual (the Internet space) corpora, -- which allows designing a set of relevant exercises for studying mechanisms of proverb translation within the linguodidactic strategy modeled by the author. Respective rules and principles for compiling certain proverb-translation exercises (translating, analyzing and translating-analyzing ones) with a broad recommended list of motivation tools (translating the same proverb by different images, by each equivalence level, by celebrity's words, etc.) aimed at mastering learned materials are described as well with revealing relevant examples that can be used by an instructor for teaching proverb adequate-rendering features for university students of the Translation major.

Key words: proverb, corpus, teaching strategy, translation technique, equivalence level.

Анотація

Степанов В. В. Лінгводидактичний потенціал корпусних технологій у сфері вивчення особливостей перекладу прислів'їв. Стаття присвячена висвітленню аспектів прикладного залучення корпусних технологій із потужним лінгводидактичним потенціалом (конкордансер, а також паралельний, референтний та віртуальний корпуси) до вивчення особливостей перекладу прислів'їв студентами вищих навчальних закладів спеціальності «Переклад». Наведено власну стратегію викладання особливостей іншомовного відтворення прислів'їв у теоретичному та практичному руслах на основі поєднання застосованих перекладацьких прийомів В. С. Виноградова та витриманих рівнів еквівалентності В. Н. Коміссарова. Подано механізми розробки та приклади відповідних перекладацьких вправ тренувального та контрольного характеру, націлених на закріплення засвоєного матеріалу.

Ключові слова: прислів'я, корпус, стратегія викладання, перекладацький прийом, рівень еквівалентності.

Аннотация

Степанов В. В. Лингводидактический потенциал корпусных технологий в поле изучения особенностей перевода пословиц. Статья посвящается раскрытию аспектов прикладного использования корпусных технологий с мощным лингводидактическим потенциалом (конкордансер, а также параллельный, референтный и виртуальный корпусы) в изучении особенностей перевода пословиц студентами высших учебных заведений специальности «Перевод». Приведена собственная стратегия преподавания особенностей иностранного воспроизведения пословиц в теоретическом и практическом руслах на основе комбинации употребленных переводческих приёмов В.С. Виноградова и выдержанных уровней эквивалентности В. Н. Комиссарова. Поданы механизмы разработки, а также примеры соответствующих переводческих упражнений тренировочного и контрольного характера, нацеленных на закрепление усвоенного материала. Ключевые слова: пословица, корпус, стратегия преподавания, переводческий приём, уровень эквивалентности.

One of the integral parts in the language as a communication means belongs to proverbs -- statements which convey people's experience, values and views in the form of brief expressions [Колоїз 2014, p. 16]. Although proverbs have been already thoroughly researched in terms of inner and outer structure (M. F. Alefirenko, Zh. V. Koloiz, V. Mider, G. L. Permiakov, O. O. Potebnia, L. I. Taranenko, A. Teilor, V. M. Teliia, etc.), their combined corpus linguodidactic potential is still studied not completely. That conditions the research relevance.

The subject matter is a group of four corpus technologies -- concordancer, parallel, reference and virtual corpora -- while the specific research topic consists in representing their applied use within teaching proverb-translation methods as well as within constructing appropriate translation exercises.

The issue of engaging corpora into language and translation fields has been already properly covered in works by O. Yu. Mordovin, O. V. Nagel, S. O. Savchuk, P. V. Sysoev, K. P. Sosnina, R. Carter, J. Leech, M. McCarthy, A. O'Keeffe, J. Sincler, etc. Analyzing recent works of corpus researchers allows providing own recommendations as to using corpora for proverb-translation teaching, which is our research objective that is achieved by performing the following tasks: 1) to represent the essence of corpus technologies with the highest potential in terms of teaching proverb translation; 2) to reveal own strategy of proverb-translation teaching with reproducing theoretical and practical points.

The research materials comprise a proverb parallel corpus (generated on the basis of a lexicographical source) that is further enlarged and processed by virtual and reference corpora with a concordancer for implementing a modeled strategy of proverb-translation teaching. The research methods include registering and modeling methods.

The research results. Today within language and translation teaching there is a tendency to go from an explaining-study approach to a researching-study one. The latter focuses on active work of students who master studied material themselves as well as improve their own language and translation skills rather than receive knowledge directly from a teacher [Claire 2010, p. 28-44]. Such a turn happened because of employing corpus technologies, which provides new linguodidactic benefits for language and translation learning.

Linguodidactics traditionally distinguishes three types of relevant corpus technologies used in language and translation study, namely reference, parallel and learning corpora [Бук 2010, p 70]. Moreover, a certain interest hides in employing concordancers as well as a virtual corpus for facilitating language and translation study.

Corpus typology discerns multi-language corpora: aligned and unaligned ones. “Alignment” means there is a correspondence link between contrasted source-text and target-text units (usually sentences). Such aligned corpora are called parallel while unaligned corpora are called comparative. Parallel corpus is regarded as a set of source and target texts [Ludeling 2008, p. 276-277]. It embodies a visual contrast between source and target texts, which allows analyzing compared units by pairs for finding translation difficulties and sorting out what steps it is necessary to do to overcome them.

Methodology sources [Кутузов 2011, p. 368-373; Пизіна 2013, p. 127-129; Соснина (електронний ресурс); Aston 2004, p. 213-228; Halliday 2004, p. 122-124; McEnery 2012, p. 1821; Zanettin 2003, p. 16-23] indicate that using parallel corpora in language and translation study provides a possibility to process compared texts for revealing typical grammar constructions, translation transformations and contextual equivalents. Besides, students analyze material in real language environment, which enables studying vocabulary, grammar and constant language changes. Such a potential is fixed by the main parallel-corpus advantage -- a visual source-target contrast, -- which promotes students' understanding better form and content text modifications performed in translation for conveying a communicative effect and specific culture information.

In studying proverb translation parallel corpora demonstrate a huge potential as well. On the one hand, they are a reliable basis for designing analytical exercises with a task of defining proverb- translation techniques while on the other hand they can serve as a resource for correcting and arranging new proverb-translation exercises in future (for example, parallel proverb corpora are filled with students' own translation variants that are used by the teacher for arranging new analytical exercises). A contrastive character of such exercises not only improves translation- analysis skills, but also enhances a training effect: a given proverb-translation material is practised, understood and mastered properly in course of performing designed exercises, which makes students more skilled at rendering proverbs into a target language.

Reference corpus is interpreted as a standard-vocabulary corpus of a certain language that comprises texts of different themes -- from TV and radio broadcasting texts to fiction ones [Halliday 2004, p. 118]. A total language-unit amount within a reference corpus can exceed 100 million words. Among such corpora one distinguishes The British National Corpus (The BNC), The IDS Corpus, etc. Reference-corpus advantages are a distant Internet resource downloading, a huge standard-vocabulary representation in authentic literary-language texts. Reference-corpus disadvantages are a possible pay for using corpus resources, an uneven corpus text-genre representation, a slow free-resource update.

Methodology sources [Бук 2007, p. 20; Грабовий 2013, p. 48-54; Данчевська 2014, p. 5860; Дідук-Ступ'як 2010, p. 108-109; Halliday 2004, p. 118-120] open a linguodidactic potential of reference corpora. Firstly, standard vocabulary identifies collocations reflecting a lexical- grammatical word combinability. Secondly, sentence contexts clarify a polysemantic-word meaning and actualize word-use cases being typical for a certain speech style. Thirdly, standard vocabulary corrects a student's literary language. Fourthly, reference corpora are authentic giving the main benefit - to teach foreign-language speech.

In rendering proverbs reference corpora have another applied importance. Their basis is a reasonable source for checking proverbs by authenticity (when such proverbs are selected for arranging a proverb parallel corpus or for designing exercises). Moreover, in the process of completing proverb-translation exercises students can use a reference corpus for searching for an authentic foreign proverb equivalent (trust to which is supported by indicating a found equivalent with an origin source). However, considering a slow reference-corpus resource update, new proverb equivalents are registered in such corpora not very often; therefore from the search perspective reference corpora may prove to be not quite effective.

An integral part of corpus processing is concordance - a program or program tool generating a concordance, namely a total list of searched-unit usage cases within corpus contexts [Мальцева 2011, p. 214-215; Baker 2006, p. 42-44]. Usually searched units are words although some concordancers allow searching for longer units -- word combinations, sentences, etc. Among examples of concordancers there are such programs as Concordance, MicroConcord, AntConc.

As a corpus-searching program concordancer reveals a wide linguodidactic potential. In particular, methodology sources [Мальцева 2011, p. 214-218; Соснина (електронний ресурс); Сысоев 2010, p. 104-111] report on concordancer-engaging advantages in searching for cases of word, grammatical-form or grammatical-construction usage within corpus-sentence contexts. Concordancer defines frequency of separate-word use as to other words as well as modifies search parameters by left-side or right-side syntactic valences. A generated and edited concordance is also employed for designing exercises.

However, concordancer has disadvantages as well. One of them consists in necessity to keep corpus-file encoding rules strictly because wrong data encoding considerably worsens corpus- resource processing. Besides, users must additionally adjust the program for analyzing files with a certain code. Thus, for a qualitative and effective work it is necessary to encode a corpus correctly and adjust the program in advance, which also requires skills.

Engaging a concordancer into proverb-translation study has a considerable applied essence. For example, the program is a tool for constructing exercises from parallel-corpus resources: necessary concordances are generated, edited and combined into translating and analyzing tasks. Moreover, some concordancers are employed for searching for proverb equivalents when performing translation exercises -- contrastive concordances of the ABBYY Lingvo x5 electronic dictionary, virtual-corpus concordances, etc. That is why using such programs is indispensable to proverb-translation study.

Corpus is interpreted not only as a text set. The Internet space is also a global set of computer- processed electronic resources representing different language genres and functional styles. Thus, the Internet is regarded as a virtual corpus [Halliday 2004, p. 124], which allows using it for linguodidactic needs.

The virtual corpus is processed by search engines (Google, Yandex) or by concordancing sites (WebCorp, KWiCFinder) that generate a concordance of web pages where a searched resource is given. In other words, such tools are global Internet concordancers.

Methodology sources [Halliday 2004, p. 124-125; Hundt 2007, p. 7-21, p. 27] define virtual- corpus linguodidactic features. In particular, among advantages there are a regular resource update (including audiovisual materials), a record of new words and language changes, a search-parameter adjusting, a free distant resource downloading while disadvantages comprise a search-result display by browsing popularity, which requires performing new resource searches. Moreover, data update leads to sifting out old materials, which complicates search of necessary resources.

Proverb-translation study is promoted by the virtual corpus as well. Especially, its applied character is vividly seen when performing translation exercises (for a proverb-equivalent search) and when compiling a parallel corpus itself (if it is impossible to engage any other sources for proverb-equivalent search). Thus, a virtual-corpus use is quite reasonable in these cases.

In teaching translation proverbs as communicative units occupy an especial position because they are predicative set phrases with no direct foreign-language equivalents. Translation study is not reasonable within a separate proverb because it is impossible to master all translation mechanisms on the basis of single units. That is why proverbs should be arranged into a corpus for future proverb-translation study. For this aim we construct a parallel corpus of 171 proverb triads “English original -- Ukrainian translation -- Russian translation” by engaging the K.T. Barantsev's English- Ukrainian Phraseological Dictionary [Баранцев 2005] as well as the virtual corpus (the Google search engine) that will be employed as a basis for designing proverb-translation exercises of training and controlling character.

The selected proverbs can be checked by authenticity through the BNC reference corpus although this step is not obligatory: proverb originals are derived from the lexicographical source, that is they are already registered and freely used in the foreign language. Thus, we will not engage reference corpora for linguodidactic aims.

The alphabetically arranged parallel proverb corpus provides for engaging a concordancer that will be a means of designing exercises. We use the AntConc concordancer -- it generates necessary proverb-triad concordances that will be taken, edited, composed into exercises, saved in the Microsoft Word 2003 program and finally printed as tasks for translation lessons.

Exercise design is variable but relies on two principles: to translate proverbs as to the exercise task or to analyze a given proverb translation. Thus, it is necessary to find out what exercises can be constructed by employing the parallel corpus. Considering the demand of proverb-translation study, it is not reasonable to give students exercises without acquainting them with proverb-translation mechanisms. That is why one should provide the audience with theoretical material and later with practical exercises, which we offer to realize in two steps:

1) to reveal proverb-translation mechanisms as a combination of a translation technique and equivalence level;

2) to give designed proverb-translation exercises for mastering the learned material.

The theoretical step causes two questions: what proverb-translation techniques need to be learned and how it is possible to teach equivalence features. The first question is settled easily because in the translation science there are already necessary proverb-rendering techniques by V. S. Vinogradov [Виноградов 2001, p. 190-193], which can be represented as a brief Table 1:

Table 1. Proverb-Translation Techniques

The material comprised by Tables 1 and 2 is a theoretical point of proverb translation. The next step consists in providing students with designed exercises one of which is a task for training proverb translation with a necessity to keep a certain rendering technique and equivalence level. The examples of them are revealed in Tables 3 and 4:

Table 3. Translate proverbs keeping the indicated equivalence levels