Seminar | Integrating Chinese into a Multilingual Terminology Database of Environment: A Focus on Collocations

2023-11-02

6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

HS436 or Tencent Meeting 864-833-785

Detail:

Date: 2 November

Time: 18:00-19:30

Venue: HS436 or Tencent Meeting 864-833-785
(Light refreshments will be provided)

Speaker: Dr Zhiwei Han

Abstract

While there is a general consensus about the importance of providing access to combinatorial information in specialized dictionaries and terminological resources, the inclusion of collocations in such resources remains a relatively unexplored domain. Since these resources adopt predominately a concept-based approach, their structure proves to be less adapted to the description of linguistic properties of collocations. Moreover, despite considerable strides in the study of Chinese collocations across various research domains, the exploration of specialized collocations, particularly their description in terminological resources, remains in its early stages.

This research presents a methodology and a descriptive model designed to integrate Chinese collocations in a multilingual resource of environment terminology. We adopt a corpus-based methodology, and our descriptive model draws inspiration from Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology (Mel’čuk et al., 1995), enabling us to account for the complex lexico-semantic properties inherent in collocations.

In this communication, we will introduce DiCoEnviro, a multilingual terminological database developed at the University of Montreal, and provide an overview of the methodology devised for its compilation, highlighting the unique features of this resource and the intricacies of its design. We will then provide insights into the distinctive features of Chinese collocations in comparison to other languages, and elucidate the methodological adaptations to represent Chinese collocations in DiCoEnviro. This includes the collection of collocations from a specialized corpus and the encoding of terminological data.

 

Biography

Dr. Zhiwei Han is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary and Translation Studies. She holds an MA in English-to-French Translation and Terminology from Université Laval, Canada, and a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Montreal. Her research interests include specialized translation pedagogy, multilingual terminology research, corpus-based translation studies, translation technology, translation quality assessment and other fields that intersect with linguistics and professional practice.

Dr. Han has published in international peer-reviewed journals and presented at conferences in Canada, Europe, and Asia. As a member of the Meaning-Text Linguistics Observatory at the University of Montreal, she contributed to projects involving the adaptation of an environmental terminology database to Chinese and the development of an online course in terminology and documentary research.

Before joining XJTLU, Dr. Han worked as Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the University of Montreal, where she received the 2022 Teaching Excellence Award. She has been Chinese language lecturer at Université Laval. As a certified translator and terminologist in Canada, Dr. Han has also been actively involved in the language service industry, serving as a simultaneous interpreter (English-French-Chinese) for significant events, including the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

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