This thesis has documented the most relevant terms that appear in English and Spanish FTA texts, their usual length and internal composition. Addi-tionally, it has documented which are the most productive morphosyntactic patterns that can be used to extract these terms semi-automatically. It has also provided evidence for the most frequent specialized lexical combinations that involve a verb and a term found in these texts and the most frequent position where verbs can be found in relation to terms, which can be useful to improve the extraction of specialized collocations. This work has also doc-umented the FTA terms that are not yet included in specialist dictionaries from the fields of international trade and economics, which can be useful to improve lexical resources in the field of FTA and international trade. This thesis also provides a relevant methodology to carry out corpus linguistics work with specialized parallel corpora, that can be applied to other text genres.
The experiments described under Section 5.7.2 involving semantic tag-ging and a combination of several tools seems to be an effective way to study a corpus to derive important linguistic information. It seems desirable to perform further and deeper experiments involving more data and to contrast FTA texts with texts of economic and legal nature, such as EUR-Lex, the Eu-ropean Commission’s Directorate-General Translation Memory (DGT-TM), and the Europarl corpus, obtained from European Parliament proceedings (Tiedemann, 2012).
Furthermore, this thesis has provided a proposal for the computational representation of MWEs such as specialized collocations for the lexical, ter-minological and phraseological enrichment of lexical resources, by using the LMF standard.
Several observations from FTA corpus data and the literature review on the topic of the collocations that appear in specialized texts provide a basis for several concluding remarks. First, the study of specialized collocations us-ing a corpus-based and corpus-driven approach requires an interdisciplinary
dictionaries and term bases do not systematically include the usual collo-cates that co-occur with terms in a specific domain, which appear almost exclusively in specialized texts as suggested by the data. Therefore, it would be desirable to include these lexical units in specialized language resources.
Besides, the inclusion of specialized collocations in lexicons, glossaries and term bases could contribute to improving translation quality, regardless of whether it is done by a human using computer assisted translation tools or by a machine translation system that is supported by a statistical or a phrase-based translation engine.
Another remark that can be made regarding specialized collocations is that they are restricted to a subject field and have a regular tendency to maintain lexical stability among the constituents of the collocation, as sug-gested by the data presented in Section 5.7.3.
This work has amply illustrated that corpus linguistics tools and tech-niques provide efficient resources for the retrieval of these specialized collo-cations, which are not currently offered readily and systematically in general or specialized dictionaries.
This research on specialized collocations can be useful for NLP applica-tions for the exploitation of language resources, such as in the fields of ter-minology, terminography, specialized lexicography and machine translation (Gillam et al., 2002). In addition to this, it can also be used to determine how to merge and harmonize language resources without loss of information.
The lexical combination between terms and other lexical units such as verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other nouns is relevant information that should be taken into account by LSP teachers and learners. Therefore, the informa-tion of how these words combine with others in a specialized setting can also serve for the teaching of LSP and specialized translation.
Specialized collocations can also contribute to the interpretation and pro-duction of natural sounding text (McCarthy, 2006), not only in general but also in specialized domains. Besides, since the same term can be used in different domains, with different senses, the collocates of that term can be useful for the automatic identification of a topic.
7.3.1 Specialized collocations in specialized dictionar-ies
Currently, specialized dictionaries are published in a paper version while oth-ers also have an online counterpart while still othoth-ers are still published on a CD/DVD format. Yet others are encoded as machine-readable lexicons meant for NLP applications. Currently, none of the above types of dictio-nary customarily provides the usual collocates for the terms included in spe-cialized dictionaries. Spespe-cialized lexicography and terminography projects would greatly profit should word repertoires that include lexical units such as specialized collocations be developed. The specialized collocations iden-tified by the method and the tools proposed in this work can help enrich lexical resources in the field of macroeconomics and international trade. In fact, Pustejovsky (1998) claimed that in the future it would be difficult to carry out serious linguistics and NLP research without the help of adequate language resources such as electronic dictionaries and computational lexico-graphic resources.
7.3.2 Collocation extraction
The approach for collocation extraction employed for this research could be used for further work on the topic. A team made by linguists, terminologists and computer scientists could use the patterns suggested in Chapter 5, to develop an improved version of a collocation extraction tool aimed at the semi-automatic identification of collocations found in specialized corpora, not only in the field of FTAs, but also in related domains such as legal and economic texts as well as in medical and scientific texts. Such a system could benefit from the findings of this thesis, regarding the lexical, semantic and morphosyntactic distribution and patterns that form specialized collocations in FTA texts. Also, the experiments suggest that the extraction could be greatly improved by means of the use of a list of seed terms. These seed terms can be taken from the gold standard of terms constituted for this project or the candidate terms extracted semi-automatically with Termostat.
7.3.3 Specialized translation
The use of the adequate collocations is necessary for the transmission of a specialized message and a qualified translator is well aware of this, as pointed out by Fontenelle (1994)
It is therefore important that students should be aware of such collo-cations and able to use them adequately when translating a text into a foreign language, since they are going to be judged by their ability to manipulate these ready-made chunks of language.
This work has provided a list of central terms and the lexical items that form specialized collocations with these terms and which are relevant for transla-tion purposes in domains related to internatransla-tional trade. This knowledge is relevant for translation instructors and students as well as translation pro-fessionals when dealing with texts from the field of international trade or economics-related topics.