Tips 'n' Tools for Translators and Language Teachers

Book review: "The Linguistic Toolkit for Teachers of English"

2026-06-22T14:46:00Z

As you might imagine from its title, this book is a handbook for practising teachers and students who intend working in the field of language teaching. The author, Rolf Kreyer, is a professor of modern English linguistics and works at the University of Marburg in Germany. It was students of his who inspired him to write the work.

Unlike guides on practical teaching techniques, this book aims to provide its readers with a thorough grounding in key aspects of modern linguistics that are relevant to teaching and learning a second language. It shows you how this theoretical foundation can be used effectively to teach a foreign language to learners (hence its subtitle, "Discovering the value of linguistics for foreign language teaching").

Section 2, "Errors and why they are a good thing", is about making mistakes in a foreign language and about the various stages in mastering it (the learner's "interlanguage"). Sections 3 and 4 are on sounds, pronunciation and comparative phonetics ("What are you sinking about?”). The author even goes into the rarely mentioned subject of "weak" forms of sounds (like the "e" in "the", as opposed to the clearer/stronger "e" in "empty" or "elephant"). Such "weak" sounds often occur in English, but many German learners are not aware of them. Sections 5 and 6 are on words, the mental lexicon and interrelatedness. Sections 7 and 8 are to do with corpus linguistics and how corpora (collections of texts) can be used in the classroom to show how words are commonly used or grouped together (collocations). Sections 9, 10 and 11 are about text work, the differences between spoken and written English, and how to express politeness. Finally, sections 12 and 13 focus on communicating, on the importance of background knowledge and on how information is packaged in different ways, which are not always easy to "unpack" correctly, even for native speakers.

It's quite an achievement to compress these aspects of linguistics into 300 pages, but Prof. Kreyer has done a good job of it in my opinion. On top of that, he has included various examples, diagrams and tables to help readers grasp the concepts better and has incorporated practical exercises in each chapter as well.

Tips for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter for those who want to find out more about the subjects he discusses. All the works he refers to are listed in the bibliography near the end of the book, followed by a glossary of technical terms and an index with page references to help readers find the sections they need quickly.

This is a well-designed book that is written in a readily accessible style, making it a good read for any language teacher, regardless of what language they choose to focus on. Some sections are easier to follow than others because they are relatively technical, but the contents are always outlined clearly and the short exercises make you think about the topics and apply what you have just learnt. Some supplementary material is provided for free on the publisher's website, which can be accessed by keying in a code inside the book cover.

My only gripes about this textbook are that it would have been good to get the whole book proof-read by a native speaker of English before it went to print (I would gladly have done it as I'm a language teacher myself!). Besides that, there's no mention of translation in the table of contents or the index, even though it's an age-old skill and something every learner does automatically. How we translate words, sentences and ideas into another language is a fascinating subject in itself. Translation techniques can be taught explicitly in the classroom to help students do it better themselves. After all, translation is a cognitive process and therefore part of psycholinguistics.

Click on this link to the publisher's website to view the table of contents online. (I particularly liked section 4.3, entitled "France is bacon"! It's about how words are linked together in spoken English.)

It's obtainable directly from the publisher or through your local bookshop.

Publisher/year: narr/francke/attempto, 2023

ISBN: 978-3-8233-8611-7 (printed version), 978-3-8233-9611-8 (ePDF)

Hope you enjoy the read as much as I did.

Carl

Book review - methods in computer linguistics

2025-08-08T14:18:00Z

Computerlinguistische Methoden für die Digital Humanities. Eine Einführung für Geisteswissenschaftler:innen

by Melanie Andresen

While I was studying Applied Linguistics at university in Hamburg back in the 1990s, the academic subject of computer linguistics was just developing. I touched on the interdisciplinary field of computing and foreign language learning and teaching in some of my courses and later went on to write my Master's thesis about acquiring foreign-language vocabulary using software packages currently on the German market.

In other courses, we analysed language textbooks by using a digital corpus we created ourselves and rudimentary commands written in Turbo Pascal, a programming language popular at the time. This simple computer analysis of the contents and structure of language textbooks was essentially a practical, hands-on introduction to corpus linguistics in the language education sector.

A lot has happened in educational computing since then and a host of studies have been carried out based on digital corpuses of written language from sources like novels or news magazines. Lexicographers (dictionary compilers) built up huge databases of pre-existing linguistic data, most of which was in written form rather than spoken, and analysed these by computer to obtain information about the various senses of a word, its frequency and the contexts in which it was used in the corpus, for example. The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary project was an early case in point from the 1980s and led to some very useful material being produced for language learners and teachers alike.

Some of the methods employed in corpus linguistics are also used in the field of computer linguistics, so there is an overlap to an extent. Melanie Andresen points this out in the introduction to her recent book on methods used in the digital humanities today, explaining how the two fields are linked and how they differ (see pp. 14-16). In a nutshell, while corpus linguistics describes the use of language by analysing corpora and looking for linguistic patterns, computer linguistics tries to model languages on computers in order to find technical solutions to practical problems (p. 16, quoting T. McEnery & A. Hardie, Corpus Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 228).

Computer linguists analyse language corpora for a number of reasons, one of which is to learn how to simulate speech on a computer and get it to produce helpful responses to things that users say. So one aim is to create chatbots and other 'interactive assistants' that can converse with customers in a naturally sounding way and help them achieve what they want to do (finding out how to get somewhere while they are driving, say).

Melanie Andresen's book is aimed at newcomers to the subject who have a background in the humanities and who presumably want to know how computational methods from another field can help them analyse humanistic data in new ways, gaining insights they would not have discovered otherwise by taking a traditional approach. She begins by outlining the basic concepts of linguistics of relevance to computer linguists, such as lexical aspects of language, syntax, semantics and pragmatics (chapters 2 to 8 ). The second part of the book concerns specific methods, such as corpus searches, manual annotation, machine learning and deep learning (chapters 9 to 12). These last two chapters will be of particular interest to translators who use CAT tools or online tools with an MT (machine-translation) component like Linguee/DeepL.

The third and final section of the book is called 'Gesellschaft' (society) and explores the issue of ethics in computer linguistics, or rather, artificial intelligence. Spanning 12 pages (in the first edition of the book), this part discusses issues such as dual uses of technology (i.e. conflicting uses), unclear authorship and 'author profiling' using metadata about people who have provided some of the linguistic data in the corpus (section 13.2). Other topics she goes into are bias, discrimination and (lack of) representation in the data, which all have a negative effect on the computer's linguistic output.

I'm still reading this interesting book at the moment, but one thing that's struck me already is that the author focuses on explaining what computer linguistics is rather than giving her readers an idea of how it could be employed in their own area of the humanities. (The digital dictionary examples above are my own, not hers.) How might it be employed by historians, for example? Some practical suggestions and pointers would have been helpful, I'm sure.

Still, Andresen's introduction to the subject is well written and certainly gives the reader some insights into a new interdisciplinary field that is expanding rapidly. Here's a link to the book on the publisher's website. You can order a printed copy of it online or from any bookshop (Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2024, €26.99 for the softcover version, €21.99 for the e-book).

Enjoy the read.

Carl

Friday, 8 August 2025

Glossaries on manuscripts and bookmaking

2021-03-04T23:00:00Z

Do you happen to know what the difference is between "recto" and "verso"? How is a "folio" different to a "page"? What exactly is a "codex" and how does it relate to a printed book?

Yes, you guessed it - I'm on about manuscripts this time. Here are a few links to glossaries on the Web and in print that I've found useful in my own editing and translation work about codicology:

A general glossary provided by the British Library, London: Glossary on Illuminated Manuscripts
A short glossary by the University of Nottingham: glossary on medieval books

Glossary of English terms concerned with medieval art and architecture (listed in sections from A to Z).
Harvard's METRO glossary (on Middle English texts such as Chaucer's works).
Glossary of Hebrew terms by the British Library, with illustrations.
A comprehensive glossary of German terms on medieval bookmaking and illustration by Heidelberg University ("Bibliotheca Palatina" project). This has illustrations as well as detailed explanations of terms.
Glossary of Lao manuscript terms (in English and Lao). These explanations relate to the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts ("DLLM"), which is a project to save the contents of Lao manuscripts by digitising the material.

I'll be adding more links as time goes on. Please let me know of any helpful ones you are familiar with so I can take a look at them and possibly share them here.

One printed work in German that is related and deserves a mention here is "Buchmalerei. Terminologie in der Kunstgeschichte" by Christine Jakobi-Mirwald, particularly Chap. 12, which is a 27-page mini-dictionary of German terms in English, French and Italian.

Another notable dictionary that is in English is Peter Beal's "A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450-2000", published by OUP. This printed work is pricey, but there's a Kindle version of it (an e-book) that's good value and handy when working on a computer or tablet. Beal's dictionary is a comprehensive one with clear definitions for all the entries.

Hope you find these tips helpful.

Regards

Carl

Note: the image above shows a page of a 15th-century manuscript depicting Vincent of Beauvais, the author, working on it.
(Wikipedia Commons, public domain)