Summary
The article highlights features peculiar to English and Ukrainian business correspondence as important means of the present-day international communication. Lexical and grammatical peculiarities of business letters are analysed, common and specific features of the given text type in English and Ukrainian are distinguished.
CORPUS INVESTIGATION IN ORDER TO COMPARE
SOURCE AND TARGET TEXTS
Duruttyová M.
University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik, Košice, Slovakia
According to Baker [2001], a corpus (plural: corpora) is a collection of texts that are the object of literary or linguistic study. Baker also states that in contemporary corpus linguistics, such collections are held in electronic form, allowing the inclusion of vast quantities of texts (commonly hundreds of millions of words) and fast and flexible access to them using corpus-processing software. Most definitions lay emphasis on the need for corpora to be assembled according to explicit and precise design criteria and for specific purposes. There are other approaches stating that the entire world wide web be considered as corpora, provided that their contents are the focal point of linguistic research [Baker, 2001, p. 59].
Corpus linguistics is very important in the translation studies because knowing the fact that corpora are collections of texts representing the naturally occurring language, it may help translators to produce natural translations, bearing in mind the real usage of the particular language. Translation studies based on corpora empirically approach language description, it shows the real life occurrences, as well as natural language samples, examines syntactic and lexical as well as text features, which are typical for the particular researched language or the language that is worked with.
The approach used for the purposes of this paper are comparison of languages based on text corpora, namely English corpus of the EU Constitution, translated Slovak corpus of the EU Constitution and original corpus of Slovak legal texts.
This example of the research shows how corpora can be used to research particular words in a translation process, how translation discrepancies can be
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