Translation scholars have already recognized and discussed the importance of corpora in translation studies, translation pedagogy, and translation technology. Mona Baker, in particular, has been a leader in drawing our attention to the potential of corpora and corpus analysis in translation studies (1993, 1995, 1996). Zanettin (1994, 1998) and Varantola (1997), among others, have discussed at length the role that bilingual corpora can play in translating and learning to translate. Some translation technology vendors, mindful of the limitations of the current translation reuse paradigm, are beginning to explicitly integrate bilingual corpora into their translation workbenches (Multicorpora 2002). It is clear that the inclusion of bilingual corpora in computer-assisted translation would overcome some of the limitations of the current generation of workstations.

The prepopulation of terminology databases and translation memories used in the current generation of translation workstations would be one important result of the application of corpus-based methods. Prepopulation refers to the process of automatically providing translation material for the memories and glossaries of translation workstations without relying solely on the actions of translators. However, while the focus in computer-assisted localization /translation is currently on terminology and translation equivalents at the sentence-translation unit level, corpus-based approaches could also allow for the automatic identification and reuse of a wider range of objects useful in localization and translation than is currently offered. These other objects include, but are not limited to: concept systems (also, ontologies, concept catalogues, taxonomies, thesauri), culture-specific document templates derived from the analysis of document structure, collocation sets and phrase collections, reusable document segments and other linguistic or semantic objects. Most of these new linguistic and textual resources cannot be discovered in the limited special-purpose corpora implied by translation memories.

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