Wings and wordsAttempting to use computerized transcription and online translation tools in a specialized context

Resumen

To analyze the spoken English found within the international and intercultural community of hang glider pilots, as part of her PhD project, the author designed, conducted and recorded a series of one-on-one interviews to compile a corpus of non-academic, yet specialized, verbal English produced by a group of users of English as a second language. In this paper, the author provides insight on the use of computer-based transcription software to digitalize the recorded interviews, taking into account the presence of specialized vocabulary as well as the fact that the speakers had different accents, varying in intensity. She also extracts some of the data from the corpus to assess the plausible results using online translation tools when attempting to obtain the equivalent specialized and technical vocabulary in Spanish of several of the specialized terms found in the corpus.