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Mona Baker Professor Mona Baker, from the University of Manchester visited Harpur College on May 5, 2001. A native of Egypt, Baker has lived in England for 20 years. She is the founding editor of The Translator: Studies in International Communication, and the general editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998), for which she collaborated with Gaddis Rose, one of the seven consulting editors. Baker’s book In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (1992) has been reprinted six times and is a standard textbook worldwide.
Baker said she was delighted to speak at Binghamton University, calling the school "one of the shining lights in the field of translation" because it was among the first to have translation as an academic program. She spoke about developing materials for translation research communities, such as Harpur College’s own CRIT.
Baker and her researchers have developed "Corpus Linguistics," a software that can analyze text to find out if individual translators have their own styles. Her translation English corpus consists of 7 million works of contemporary English translations, broken down into four types of text: fiction, biography, news, and in-flight magazines. Corpus Linguistics has "headers" which explain the translator, title, sponsor, date, translation process, and original author. The software displays text patterns, which may be unique to each translator. Baker’s corpus has works by the same translator of different authors and different languages. The software indicates whether translators use the same expressions repeatedly.
Baker and her researchers chose texts translated by native English speakers (to avoid a language barrier) after 1985, all full texts, and an equal representation of male and female translators, and an equal representation among source languages.
Baker and her researchers discovered that two translations of the same text are never the same. Just as researchers have different perspectives and explanations on the same material, translators are no different.
