Specialized corpora as a translation resource: analysis of the thematic chains and its textual markers in scientific papers on neuromuscular diseases in pediatrics

Abstract

This article deals with two main topics of interest for Translation Studies: the exploitation of multilingual comparable corpora and the analysis of the relationship between a text category and its linguistic manifestation in specialized texts. In the first part of this study, we make a review of some theoretical issues related to the use of specialized corpora in translation practice. The aim in this part is not only to satisfy punctual terminological needs, but also to explore new possibilities, like those proposed by Functional Stylistics for the study of conventionalisms in specialized texts. In the second part, we describe some of the steps involved in the process of compilation and exploitation of a particular specialized corpus, that of neuromuscular diseases in pediatrics. We thereby study corpus characteristics and analysis, automatic extraction of definitional contexts, and analysis of the thematic chains and its textual markers.