Lesson 10 description

Seal the deal

Talita Serpa and Celso Fernando Rocha

Seal the deal!

The lesson Seal the deal! was designed for freshman from Languages and Translation undergraduate courses. The aims of this lesson are to a) use legal-related vocabulary present in contracts and other official documents and; b) reflect on the differences between/among the laws of different countries that result in lexicon changes.

To complete the lesson activities, two comparable corpora were built: (1) a corpus of purchase and sale contracts, and (2) a corpus of texts originally written in English referring to purchase and sale contracts as well. These corpora are both part of Rocha’s dissertation A tradução juramentada de contratos de compra e venda de títulos executivos na direção inglês→português: Semelhança e diferenças no uso de termos simples, expressões fixas e semifixas. Data from Rocha’s research are available as bilingual glossaries on Tradcorpus in Portuguese and English. However, in order to reach learners of different languages, we adapted the tasks using the English corpus only.

This lesson is available in hands-on and hands-off formats. The hands-on format requires students to access MateCat and DeepL to search for the linguistic data necessary to work on the activities. The second format does not require learners to access these tools as the linguistic data has been previously selected by the author, and is available to download in the lesson itself.

In terms of MateCat and DeepL, learners are expected to be able to use both tools as they search for other translation patterns and discuss the standardisation of legal genre texts. Check the following screenshots.

Matecat homepage.
Figure 1. Screenshot of Matecat.. Retrieved on September 20, 2022. © Matecat, all rights reserved, used with permission.
DEEPL search example.
Figure 2. Screenshot of DEEPL. Retrieved on September 20, 2022. © DeepL, all rights reserved, used with permission.

Watch Pressbooks Video 11 (YouTube, 3m25s) to learn more about MateCat and DeepL.


About the authors

Talita Serpa has a PhD in Linguistic Studies from the Institute of Biosciences, Languages and Exact Sciences of the São Paulo State University (IBILCE/UNESP) with research about Corpus-Based Translation Pedagogy and Translation Studies (2017). She was also an Academic Visitor at The University of Manchester (UK) (2015-2016) and currently holds the position of Postdoctoral Researcher at UNESP, with CAPES/PNPD assistance (2019-2023), supervised by Prof. Dr. Diva Cardoso de Camargo. She works with Translation Practices and ESP. Member of the Groups Translation, Terminology and Corpora and En-Corpora: Teaching Based and Directed by Corpora (CNPq). She works with Teaching of Translation, Sociology of Translation, Corpus-based Translation Studies and ESP.

Celso Fernando Rocha is a Lecturer at the São Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil) and is currently finishing a five years Bachelor’s degree at Law School. He has also a Bachelor’s degree in Translation, a Master’s and a Ph.D degree in Applied Linguistics. He is currently teaching Spanish Language to a teacher’s training program and to Translation students.

Licence

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Using Language Data to Learn About Language: A Teachers' Guide to Classroom Corpus Use Copyright © 2023 by Talita Serpa and Celso Fernando Rocha is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book