Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing

As in many other areas, computing systems and software have become increasingly important in the practice and scholarly studies of translation. This chapter reviews the main developments in the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing, describing the tools they have produced and the uses these tools have been put to in translation and methodology. It briefly outlines the main lines of research in computational linguistics, namely symbolic methods and statistical learning methods, and then focuses on examples of applications of these methods in translation and translation studies. Tools developed specifically for such applications which combine these methods are described in concrete examples. These examples cover creation and indexing of corpora, language processing, and computational linguistics in analysis and visualisation of text. This is followed by a discussion of the main issues and topics regarding the use of computational linguistics methods in translation practice and research, and recommendations for researchers and practitioners who use or may wish to use these methods and tools in their work.