Session

Language is phraseological by nature, i.e. it consists of words that only acquire their meaning and communicative value in connection with other words with which they form typical word combinations. These word combinations, called phrasemes or set expressions, are characterised by their polylexicality and varying degrees of strength and idiomaticity. This applies not only to general language, but also to specialised languages. The latter also have word combinations in their specialised vocabulary (i.e. specialised collocations).

We will first give a general introduction to the topic and present a possible classification of subject-specific phrasemes. We will analyse some texts from a subdomain of law from the point of view of subject-specific phraseology. Then, we will examine the possibilities offered by modern corpus query systems for identifying phrasemes in monolingual or parallel corpora. We will try different tools and test them, for example, for term and collocation extraction.

The aim of the course is to show the relevance of specialised phraseology for the interpretation of legal language and also to convey practical skills. These are required for retrieving terminological data for compiling termbases or producing specialised translations.

The course is aimed at experienced and aspiring translators as well as anyone interested in the subject.

NB: Course participants will work with their own laptop.