Sara Castagnoli

The PAISÀ Corpus of Italian Web Texts

PAISA is a Creative Commons licensed, large web corpus of contemporary Italian. We describe the design, harvesting, and processing steps involved in its creation.

Extracting MWEs from Italian corpora: A case study for refining the POS-pattern methodology

An established method for MWE extraction is the combined use of previously identified POS-patterns and association measures. However, the selection of such POSpatterns is rarely debated. Focusing on Italian MWEs containing at least one adjective, we set out to explore how candidate POS-patterns listed in relevant literature and lexicographic sources compare with POS sequences exhibited by statistically significant n-grams including an adjective position extracted from a large corpus of Italian. All literature-derived patterns are found—and new meaningful candidate patterns emerge—among the top-ranking trigrams for three association measures. We conclude that a final solid set to be used for MWE extraction will have to be further refined through a combination of association measures as well as manual inspection.

Investigating trainee translators’ contrastive pragmalinguistic competence: a corpus-based analysis of interclausal linkage in learner translations

ABSTRACT This article aims to investigate trainee translators’ contrastive pragmalinguistic competence, starting from the assumption that – although more elusively than knowledge about culture-specific references – it represents an important subcomponent of intercultural competence, which can determine the adequacy of translated texts. The study focuses in particular on the translation of interclausal linkage, as it is a form of cohesion which displays different preferences across languages. A multi-parallel corpus of English-to-Italian learner translations of the same source text is analysed to detect regularities and variation in the language behaviour of trainee translators. The frequency of connectives in target texts is compared to both the respective source texts and comparable non-translated Italian texts, in order to determine whether translations are mainly shaped by interference or normalisation. The results of the quantitative analysis confirm previous findings that interference is predominant, with students closely reproducing source text conjunctive patterns at the risk of making translations sound unnatural; more refined qualitative observations, however, reveal that there are also attempts at normalisation. A discussion of the relevance to translator training of the insights obtained is provided, together with suggestions for inclusion in training programmes.