Importancia del desarrollo de la inteligencia emocional en la prevención del Burnout en

Imagine a situaon in the pre-Google era, say around 1990, where a trainee translator has wrien a sentence containing the word combinaon ‘at the service of’. The reviser has made a change, substung ‘in the service of’, and when challenged on this, replies in an authoritave tone: “You can’t say that in English”. It being highly unlikely that the translator can supply a large number of instances of ‘at the service of’ from original English texts, the situaon was simply one of conflicng intuions, and the reviser would prevail if he or she was the one responsible for the linguisc quality of the translaon.

Nowadays the situaon is quite different. If a word combinaon is idiomac, it will be easy for the translator to enter the expression in Google and supply a large number of instances within seconds. It may be that all or most of these are in texts not wrien by nave speakers, or in texts which are themselves translaons and thus suspect. But there may also be a great many instances of the expression in what are clearly original texts by nave speakers. In that case, if the reviser sll wants to make a change, it will no longer suffice to pronounce the expression in queson ‘wrong’. Aer all, an idiomac expression is by definion a combinaon of words frequently used by nave speakers, and the possible combinaons in a language are not fixed forever; new ones arise regularly. So to jusfy a change, the Google-era reviser will need an argument: the samples you have found in Google are from a different genre; they are on a different topic; they have marks of oral- ity whereas the translaon is a piece of formal wring; there are no instances on Australian sites, and the text is for an Australian audience. With regard to this last point, it is oen useful to restrict the scope of Google’s search: if you want to see examples of (mostly) Australian English, add ‘site:.au’ at the end of your search string; if you want to see samples of the client’s usage, add ‘site:myclient.com’.

98 Brian Mossop

If you are working in a language pair that has many ‘false friends’ (e.g. Dutch/English or French/English), you may find yourself wondering whether a certain expression in the translaon is really idiomac. If your intuion does not supply an immediate answer, Google may help. Suppose that in working from French to English the translator has referred to the ‘progressive introducon’ of a procedure, but you think English ‘progressive’ may be a false friend of French ‘progressif’. Google gives you 57,000 hits for ‘progressive introducon’ but 297,000 for ‘gradual introducon’. Does this result jusfy revising ‘progressive’ to ‘gradual’? The answer is no: 57,000 is a large number, and there is no reason why idiomac English should not use both ‘progressive’ and ‘gradual’. The fact that one synonym is less common is not a reason to reject it. Google tells us that ‘wrong answer’ occurs about seven mes more frequently than ‘incorrect an- swer’, but that is not a reason to replace the laer with the former. However if the hitlist for ‘progressive introducon’ had been considerably shorter, and several of the hits near the top of the list had been from sites in non-English-speaking countries, that might jusfy revision to ‘gradual’. (Bear in mind that asking for ‘pages in English’ does not limit the search to any parcular countries, and of course it cannot disnguish nave from non-nave writers.)

When using Google, the engine’s peculiar features must be kept in mind. Sup- pose you want to know whether ‘the applicaon he presented’ is alright. Does one present an applicaon? On the day I searched, there were indeed a vast number of hits for this expression, but almost all contained ‘…the applicaon. He presented…’. Google does not ‘noce’ punctuaon and capitalizaon.

A further difficulty is that while Google can tell you whether an expression exists, it cannot tell you how readers will understand it, that is, which meaning of the expression’s constuent words they will select. For example, in some contexts, ‘the applicaon he presented’ might be taken to mean the applicaon which he ‘showed’ rather than ‘submied’.

A final word on word combinations: while care must be exercised when using Google, the ability it affords to check authencity of language can be a great benefit to anyone self-revising a translaon into their second language.

When it comes to syntacc structures, the situaon is somewhat different than with idiomac expressions. It’s hard to check the occurrence of many structures, because you have to select a parcular wording. Consider this sen- tence: ‘It’s not because you are in polics that you forsake the right to protect your reputaon’. You can certainly ask Google for the sequence ‘it’s not because you are’ and you will get 103 million hits, but a quick look at the first dozen hits reveals that none of them contain the above structure (‘it’s not because x that y’). If you ask for ‘it’s not because you are in polics that’, you will get 0 hits, but that does not prove that the structure itself does not occur, only that it does not occur with the parcular wording ‘…you are in polics…’. There do exist special databases of English texts that have been grammacally parsed, so that you can ask directly for all the sentences in the database that have a certain structure, but learning how to ask the corpus quesons will take considerable effort (for more informaon, enter ‘Internaonal Corpus of English’ in your search engine). So if you are uncertain about a sentence structure, either rely on intuion (if you

Computer Aids to Checking 99

are a nave or near-nave speaker), or simply change the sentence structure to one you are sure exists.

Also to be borne in mind, if you do succeed in finding many instances of a sentence structure using Google, is that the mere occurrence of a structure does not by itself create ‘correctness’ in the sense of Chapter 3.6. The structure ‘accept to + infinive’ (‘he accepted to translate my text’) can be found, but it should nevertheless be changed to ‘he agreed to …’. Certainly frequency is a factor to consider: at a certain point, a structure becomes so common in published work that it will be deemed standard by all but linguisc conservaves. However ‘he accepted to …’ has not yet reached that stage.