From “stuff for linguists” to professional translation tools: the complicated relationship between translators and corpora

Résumé En

The use of electronic corpora as translation aids, whether existing ones available on line or compiled as “do-it-yourself” corpora used with a concordancer, is nothing new, but its history and the relationship between professional translators and corpora can be described as “complicated”. Despite recent changes in a context where the collection and use of linguistic data are common practices and where the progress of neural machine translation and the widespread use of translation memories have increased people’s awareness of its role and importance, many professionals still tend to see electronic corpora as tools for research in linguistics or translation studies. Some even consider such an approach to be completely disconnected from their everyday reality (which is higher productivity and quality). In other words, the gap between the development of corpus tools as translation aids and the professional world has not been completely filled in spite of the efforts of a number of academics in the field – and a multitude of publications might be cited here.In this presentation, we would like to discuss both the origins of such a complicated relationship and how the problem might be solved in order to convince more professionals that electronic corpora are not exclusive to academic research.