4.1 - Anything but Terms

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Researching Vocabulary
When clients ask for a document to be translated, the top two of their priorities are always quality and speed of delivery. To satisfy both, translators need to meet certain conditions. For example, they should work with a CAT tool but should have certain knowledge of the subject field as well. Ideally, translators should possess the knowledge of the field from their own experience. However, if this is not the case, the knowledge can be gained for instance from a reference material.

But even if the translator had both (CAT tool and knowledge of the field), there is no guarantee that the resulting translation will be consistent in terms of quality and terminology. For that matter, it is essential, that an existing termbase is used for translation (or in case there is none ready, then a new one is set for that translation project).

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Reflection #1: Think of ways of gaining knowledge about a specialized field.

 

Function Words

FUNCTION WORDS are characterized by their ambiguous lexical meaning and by their ability to organize grammatical relationships between words within a sentence. There is a relatively small and fixed number of function words (as opposed to LEXICAL WORDS: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs). Prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs are all considered function words. Most of these words are uninflected although a few are inflected and may take affixes. Remind yourself of some basic facts about them:

Auxiliary Verbs are verbs whose function is to characterize the main verbs they accompany with shades of meaning pertaining to tense and/or modality.

Conjunctions are uninflected function words that serve to conjoin words, clauses, phrases, or sentences. There are three basic forms: single word (however), compound (as long as), and correlative (so ... that).

Determiners are inflected function words employed as noun modifiers and that serve to alter the referents of noun phrases in terms of amount, location, possession, and general versus specific.

Prepositions are uninflected function words that combine with nouns, pronouns, or noun phrases to form prepositional phrases. Prepositions can be simple (as, of) or compound (next to, in view of) forms.

Pronouns are inflected function words employed in place of nouns or noun phrases.

Ideally, it would be possible to list all function words (since they comprise a closed class) but this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do.

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Reflection #2: Do you think it is possible to list all function words? Make an attempt to create your own exhaustive list of English function words.


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