Toward the Specialization of Language Resources for Translators: A Bilingual Frame-based Dictionary of Road Traffic and Transportation

ABSTRACT:Translators have often been regarded by lexicographers as identical to other users, and their needs have largely been neglected in spite of the fact that they are a major group of dictionary users. In recent years and with the flourishing of online dictionaries, the development of translation dictionaries has become an important topic as a result of emerging bonds between lexicography and translation studies. The present study is an attempt to develop a method for compiling bilingual specialized dictionaries with an emphasis on translators as the main audience. The project, which is called TransLex, is based on the idea of semantic networks. It makes use of a bilingual (English and Persian) comparable corpus of road traffic and transportation materials, annotated using a set of semantic frames as well as an ontology of the concepts of this domain. An online user interface was then designed to search the database. The main feature is semantic—as opposed to alphabetic—search, which is possible through the application of several search options. This provides translators with more natural ways of expressing the concepts of a specialized field in the target language.