Cover not available
Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 68:1 (2022) ► pp.55–85

Environment terms and translation students

A reading based on Frame Semantics

| Université de Montréal
| University of Ottawa
| Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

This article reports on a pilot study that aims to shed some light on how translation students construe specialized terms. More specifically, we verified their ability to associate environment terms with specific conceptual situations (as understood by Frame Semantics [Fillmore 1976; Fillmore and Baker 2010]). Respondents (27) were asked to complete a questionnaire containing 10 different questions that assessed the association of terms with conceptual situations from different angles. Results show that respondents can associate related terms and link sets of terms to conceptual situations and can make distinctions between the different components of conceptual situations when asked to produce lists of terms or select terms from a predefined list. However, when asked to assess the similarity or difference between specific terms, respondents are less likely to produce the anticipated answer. Our findings suggest that teaching and learning activities inspired by Frame Semantics may be helpful for students to structure their terminological analysis and deal with challenges such as ambiguity and fine semantic distinctions. We hope this can ultimately contribute to helping them make informed, precise and coherent terminological choices.

Keywords: terminology, translation students, environment, Frame Semantics
Article outline
  • Frame semantics as a theoretical background
  • Setting up the pilot study
    • Hypotheses
    • Questions for testing hypotheses
    • Environment terms and gold standard
    • Assessment of questions
    • Respondents and recruitment
  • Data collection
  • Results
    • Respondents’ profile
    • Can respondents list terms linked to a suggested term? (Questions 1 and 2)
    • Can respondents link terms to a situation? (Questions 3, 4, 7, and 10)
    • Do respondents perceive similarities or differences between closely related terms? (Questions 5, 6, 8, and 9)
    • How did respondents perceive the experience of answering the questions?
    • Overview of the results
    • Implications for translator training
  • Concluding remarks, limitations, and future work
    • Future work
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00254.lho
References
Alipour, Marjan
2018 “Approche socioconstructiviste pour l’enseignement-apprentissage du lexique spécialisé : apport du corpus dans la conception d’activités lexicales.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal.
Croft, William, and D. Alan Cruse
2004 Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Deyne, Simon, Danielle J. Navarro, Amy Perfors, Marc Brysbaert, and Gert Storms
2018 “The ‘Small World of Words’ English Word Association Norms for over 12,000 Cue Words.” Behavior Research Methods 51 (3): 987–1006. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Désilets, Alain, Christiane Melançon, Geneviève Patenaude, and Louise Brunette
2009 “How Translators Use Tools and Resources to Resolve Translation Problems: An Ethnographic Study.” Proceedings of Beyond Translation Memories: New Tools for Translators, MT Summit XII 2009, Ottawa, Canada, 26 Aug. 2009. [URL]
DiCoEnviro. Dictionnaire fondamental de l’environnement
Montreal: Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte. [URL]
Dolbey, Andrew, Michael Ellsworth, and Jan Scheffczyk
2006 “BioFrameNet: A Domain-specific FrameNet Extension with Links to Biomedical Ontologies.” In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation: “Biomedical Ontology in Action” (KR-MED 2006), Baltimore, Maryland, 8 Nov. 2006, 87–94. [URL]
Faber, Pamela
ed. 2012 A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faber, Pamela, Juan Verdejo, Pilar León Araúz, Arianne Reimerink, and Gloria Guzmán
2014 “Neural Substrates of Specialized Knowledge Representation: An fMRI Study.” Revue française de linguistique appliquée [French journal of applied linguistics] 19 (1): 15–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J.
1976 “Frame Semantics and the Nature of Language.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech 2801: 20–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1982 “Frame Semantics.” In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, edited by The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
1985 “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.” Quaderni di Semantica 61: 222–254.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., and Beryl T. Atkins
1992 “Toward a Frame-based Lexicon: The Semantics of RISK and its Neighbors.” In Frames, Fields and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization, edited by A. Lehrer, and E. Feder Kittay, 75–102. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., and Collin Baker
2010 “A Frames Approach to Semantic Analysis.” In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, edited by Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog, 313–339. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Framed DiCoEnviro
Montreal: Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte. [URL]
FrameNet
Berkeley: International Computer Science Institute. [URL]
Ghazzawi, Nizar
2016 “Du terme prédicatif au cadre sémantique : méthodologie de compilation d’une ressource terminologique pour des termes prédicatifs arabes en informatique.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal.
Gough, Joanna
2016 “The Patterns of Interaction between Professional Translators and Online Resources.” Ph.D. diss., University of Surrey.
Kübler, Natalie, Alexandra Mestivier, and Mojca Pecman
2018 “Teaching Specialised Translation Through Corpus Linguistics: Translation Quality Assessment and Methodology Evaluation and Enhancement by Experimental Approach.” Meta 63 (3): 806–824. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
L’Homme, Marie-Claude
2012 “Adding Syntactico-semantic Information to Specialized Dictionaries: An Application of the FrameNet Methodology.” Lexicographica 281: 233–252. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 “Maintaining the Balance between Knowledge and the Lexicon in Terminology: A Methodology Based on Frame Semantics.” Lexicography. Journal of Asialex 4 (1): 3–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
L’Homme, Marie-Claude, Benoît Robichaud, and Carlos Subirats
2020 “Building Multilingual Specialized Resources Based on FrameNet: Application to the Field of the Environment.” In International FrameNet Workshop 2020. Towards a Global, Multilingual FrameNet. Proceedings, Workshop of the Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020, 94–102. Marseille: ELRA.Google Scholar
Malm, Per, Shafqat Mumtaz Virk, Lars Borin, and Aanju Saxena
2018 “LingFN: Towards a FrameNet for the Linguistics Domain.” In International FrameNet Workshop 2018. Multilingual FrameNets and Constructions. Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan, 12 May 2018, 37–43. Miyazaki: ELRA.Google Scholar
Martin, Willy
1998 “Frames as Definitions Models for Terms.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Professional Communication and Knowledge Transfer, Vienna, Austria, 24–26 Aug. 1998, 189–221. Vienna: TermNet.Google Scholar
Massey, Gary, and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow
2011 “Investigating Information Literacy: A Growing Priority in Translation Studies.” Across Languages and Cultures 12 (2): 193–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Douglas L., Cathy L. McEvoy, and Thomas A. Schreiber
2004 “The University of South Florida Free Association, Rhyme, and Word Fragment Norms.” Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 36 (3): 402–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pimentel, Janine
2013 “Methodological Bases for Assigning Terminological Equivalents. A Contribution.” Terminology 19 (2): 237–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ruppenhofer, Josef, Michael Ellsworth, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Christopher R. Johnson, Collin F. Baker, and Jan Scheffczyk
2016 FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice. Berkeley: International Computer Science Institute.Google Scholar
Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson
1977 Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Thomas
2009 “The Kicktionary – A Multilingual Lexical Resources of Football Language.” In Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography: Methods and Applications, edited by Hans C. Boas, 101–132. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Torrent, Tiago T., Maria Margarida M. Salomão, Fernanda C. A. Campos, Regina M. M. Braga, Ely E. S. Matos, Maucha A. Gamonal, Julia A. Gonçalves, Bruno C. P. Souza, Daniela S. Gomes, and Simone R. Peron
2014 “Copa 2014 FrameNet Brasil: A Frame-based Trilingual Electronic Dictionary for the Football World Cup.” In COLING 2014: The 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, Dublin, Ireland, 23–29 Aug. 2014, 10–14. Dublin: Dublin City University and Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Yuxiu, Yu
2024. Application of translation technology based on AI in translation teaching. Systems and Soft Computing 6 ► pp. 200072 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.