Yuste Rodrigo, Elia, ed. (2008): Topics in Language Resources for Translation and Localisation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 220 p.

Globalization brought about many significant changes to the translation market and translators are nowadays under immense pressure to work more quickly and still maintain a high quality of work. Electronic resources and tools are therefore the assistance to which translators turn in an effort to balance the need for increased productivity with the need for high quality. Although some authors make a distinction between tools and resources, namely Alcina (2008), in this collective work edited by Yuste Rodrigo, language resources are to be understood according to the European Language Resources Association (ELRA) as After having organised several workshops under the title Language resources for translation (LR4Trans), where this term and its acronym were first formally used, Yuste Rodrigo realized that some efforts are yet to be made to raise awareness about language resources in general, and language resources for translation and localisation, in particular, to an audience wider than the academic and research circles. Under this motivation the editor carefully selected 12 contributions that aim to reflect the state of the art of research, work practices, and industry standards in language resources for translation and localisation. Even though there is no clear stated editorial division among the 12 contributions, the reader will find that the book is divided into mainly two parts. The first part corresponds to the first 6 contributions (Chapters 1-6), which focus on the relevance of corpora in translation studies and especially on the role of corpora in educating translators. The second part corresponds to the final 6 contributions (Chapters 7-12), which focus on as different subjects as CAT tools, content management, community translating, standards development, and localisation’s current challenges. Following the editor’s introduction, the book opens up with a chapter on bilingual concordancers (BC) and translation memory systems (TMS). In this paper entitled A comparative evaluation of bilingual concordancers and translation memory systems, Lynne Bowker and Michael Barlow are concerned with analyzing the strengths and limitations of BCs and TMS so as to identify the circumstances where they can be best applied. They convincingly argue that if some BC features were integrated into a TMS, users might profit best from a new hybrid tool. In Chapter 2, Interactive reference grammars: Exploiting parallel and comparable treebanks for translation, Silvia Hansen-Schirra proposes that annotated corpora be used as works of reference for grammatical translation problems. Taking the different use of word order, clefting and raising constructions in English and German as examples, the author demonstrates how monolingual and multilingual treebanks may be helpful for looking up translation solutions for language specific grammatical constructions and hence suitable for translator training too. The following four contributions all share a focus on the topic of translator training. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that future translators will be best prepared if they are educated in the academic setting, where they can use technology and resources to better understand language and translation, and then trained throughout their professional life, where they will have the time to skillfully practise the use of technology. More specifically, Chapter 3 by Silvia Bernardini and Sara Castagnoli, Corpora for translator education and translation practice, emphasises the role corpora can play in educating the next generation of future translators, namely by developing students’ ability to employ available knowledge to solve new problems and to gain new knowledge whenever is required. Then, in Chapter 4, CORPÓGRAFO V.4: Tools for educating translators, Belinda Maia explains how the freely online available Corpógrafo, a tool suite for parallel and comparable corpora building and analysis as well as terminology research and management, can be used to educate …