Parthena Charalampidou
2021
The Use of Corpora in an Interdisciplinary Approach to Localization
Parthena Charalampidou
Proceedings of the Translation and Interpreting Technology Online Conference
Translation Studies and more specifically, its subfield Descriptive Translation Studies [Holmes 1988/2000] is, according to many scholars [Gambier, 2009; Nenopoulou, 2007; Munday, 2001/2008; Hermans, 1999; Snell-Hornby et al., 1994 e.t.c], a highly interdisciplinary field of study. The aim of the present paper is to describe the role of polysemiotic corpora in the study of university website localization from a multidisciplinary perspective. More specifically, the paper gives an overview of an on-going postdoctoral research on the identity formation of Greek university websites on the web, focusing on the methodology adopted with reference to corpora compilation based on methodological tools and concepts from various fields such as Translation Studies, social semiotics, cultural studies, critical discourse analysis and marketing. The objects of comparative analysis are Greek and French original and translated (into English) university websites as well as original British and American university website versions. Up to now research findings have shown that polysemiotic corpora can be a valuable tool not only of quantitative but also of qualitative analysis of website localization both for scholars and translation professionals working with multimodal genres.