Art history-related terms in a parallel bilingual (English-Spanish) corpus

Abstract

Although recent years have witnessed some relevant contributions to the study of museum text translation, scholars such as Guillot (2014), Liao (2018) and Neather (2018) suggest that this field deserves further study. This paper aims to analyze the most salient terms related to art history and museography found in a parallel, aligned corpus composed of texts from museums and art centres in the United States. These texts were originally written in English and subsequently translated into Spanish. Almost 40 museums and art centers contribute to this corpus, which is currently in the process of being updated. The section that is already aligned—which is composed of texts from New York City museums—contains more than 750,000 and 840,000 words in the English and Spanish subcorpus, respectively. The current version of the corpus is described in a recent paper (Leiva Rojo, 2020). Approaches to specialized terminology in art history and museography will be applied, namely the contributions of Nelson & Shiff (2010), Harpring (2010) and Carpi (2015), among others. The most common and interesting terms related to art history and museography will be extracted and analyzed by using the Wordlist and Keywords functions in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014). A reference corpus consisting of texts from museums and art centres in Spain and from museums in other Spanish-speaking countries is used in order to compare the Spanish translations of these key terms.