Corpus Linguistics tools for the creation of linguistic resources that support the internationalisation of tertiary education

In the last decades, universities have developed different internationalisation strategies based on the English language, such as English-medium instruction courses or the translation of institutional websites, with the purpose of improving their international visibility and attracting international students (Dearden, 2014; Ferguson, 2007). However, the literature (e.g. Ferguson et al., 2011; Pérez-Llantada et al. 2011) has consistently reported the multiple difficulties faced by non-English native scholars when using English for their academic tasks. As part of the internationalisation strategy of a medium-sized Spanish university, lecturers must translate to English their modules’ teaching guides. Given this situation, this study proposes the use of corpus linguistics tools to create a series of support resources that facilitate the translation of those documents. A corpus of 113 institutional reports written by the university and verified by the Spanish National Agency for Quality and Accreditation. These documents were gathered because they included all the information that later on the lecturers have to use in their teaching guides of both undergraduate and graduate degrees. In this way it was possible to familiarise with the official terminology that lecturers should use. The AntConc v3.5.7 software was used to extract frequency lists and concordances to identify the lecturers’ recurrent terminology and phraseology. Based on the quantitative results, three resources were created. Firstly, a glossary of the teaching activities with their translation and definition so that lecturers could use them accurately. Secondly, a glossary with the most frequently used expressions written in Spanish, their equivalent in English, and a concordance line that illustrates the use of that specific term in context. Lastly, several teaching guide templates were created to homogenise the teaching guide genre while simultaneously allowing variation according to disciplinary differences. By sharing these resources with the lecturers, it was expected that some of the translation challenges they may face (terminology inconsistencies, literal translation, target readership) (Hurtado, 2001; Parra Galiano, 2005) would be overcome.

References:

Dearden, J. (2014). English as a medium of instruction– a growing global phenomenon. British Council.

Ferguson, G. (2007). The global spread of English, scientific communication and ESP: questions of equity, access and domain loss. Ibérica, 13, 7-38.

Ferguson, G.; Pérez-Llantada, C. and Plo, R. (2011). English as an international language of scientific publication: a study of attitudes. World Englishes, 30(1), 41–59.

Hurtado Albir, A. (2001). Traducción y traductología: introducción a la traductología. Madrid: Cátedra.

Parra Galiano, S. (2005). La revisión de traducciones en la Traductología: aproximación a la práctica de la revisión en el ámbito profesional mediante el estudio de casos y propuestas de investigación (Doctoral thesis). Granada: Universidad de Granada.

Pérez-Llantada, C.; Plo, R. and G. Ferguson. (2011). “You don’t say what you know, only what you can”: The perceptions and practices of senior Spanish academics regarding research dissemination in English. English for Specific Purposes, 30, 18–30.