Translational English Corpus (TEC)

The Translational English Corpus (TEC) is a corpus of contemporary translational English: it consists of written texts translated into English from a variety of source languages, European and non-European. It was set up and is currently managed by Professor Mona Baker at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies. The custom-made software for processing the corpus, which is downloadable from the web, is designed by Dr. Saturnino Luz, University of Edinburgh, who is also in charge of maintaining the corpus.

What type of research does TEC support?

TEC has supported a broad range of studies in two main areas: the way in which the patterning of translated text might be different from that of non-translated text in the same language, and stylistic variation across individual translators.

What does TEC consist of?

TEC consists of four subcorpora: fiction, biography, news and inflight magazines. The overall size of the corpus is currently around ten million words. It can be accessed freely via the web, using a custom-built concordancer designed by Dr. Saturnino Luz.

TEC – Contents

TEC is meticulously documented in terms of extralinguistic features such as gender, nationality and occupation of the translator, direction of translation, source language, publisher of the translated text, etc. This information is held in a separate header file for each text.

TEC – Sample Header File

The concordancing software is designed to make the information in the header file available to the researcher at a glance.

TEC tree - democracy

Software tools

TECTo access the new and improved version of the TEC concordancing tool, go to the software section of this site to download and install the correct version of the tool for your PC/laptop (Windows or Mac Version). Follow the instructions for unzipping the relevant folders.

Once installed, you can access TEC by going to ‘File’->’New remote corpus…’ and replacing the last digit with zero: genealogies.mvm.ed.ac.uk:1240  as the IP address of the new corpus server.

If you find any bugs in the software, please report them at https://sourceforge.net/p/modnlp/tickets/ (click on ‘Create ticket’ on the menu on the left).

The new functionality of the TEC tool is described in in our recent paper: Luz, S., Sheehan, S. (2020) ‘Methods and visualization tools for the analysis of medical, political and scientific concepts in Genealogies of Knowledge’, Palgrave Communications 6(49). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0423-6

You may also find it helpful to consult the Genealogies of Knowledge software manual at https://genealogiesofknowledge.net/software/manual/