[Air-l] counting google hits

[Louise Ferguson]

A lot of technical translators use Google in all kinds of interesting
ways - they've become quite sophisticated at it over the years, with
all sorts of tricks.

Any corpus is going to be biased. For example, if you're a medical
translator, you'll have a shelf full (or various shevles full) of
bilingual and monolingual medical dictionaries that will not include a
huge number of words used in the current medical research literature,
owing to the pace at which research moves the subject on (and also
owing to the fact that dictionaries don't tend to focus on the
frontiers of a subject). A five-year-old medical dictionary, however
good, is next to useless if you're translating research papers for
current publication in places like the Lancet, the BMJ, JAMA etc.

It's actually far better sometimes to use Google and other search
engines to see who is writing what where, and whether it's only French
websites - for example - or Romance-language sites, using a particular
expression (in other words, a highly unreliable expression), or
whether it's also on the main English-speaking research websites (and
particularly in journal article titles). If you're translating peer
reviews or peer-reviewed papers, it's often the only way to track down
certain novel terms.

I think technical translators would be among the first to vote for
open publishing of academic journal articles, which would aid
enormously in getting rid of some of the biases they face with current
online information.

Louise Ferguson