Abstract in English

Dictionaries have always been and still are one of the main tools for the translator s task. Nevertheless,
terminography does not seem to have systematically benefited, at least in Brazil, from the close relation between
technical dictionaries and this increasingly significant and particular target audience: technical translators. In the
field of Culinary, for instance, which has witnessed a growing demand for translations in Brazil, much as the
dictionaries available for the English-Portuguese language pair may contribute to the understanding of the source
text, they still do not provide any information on how the terms are actually used in real texts. In other words, they
do not help the translator in a crucial step of the translation activity: text production in the target language. The
thesis advanced here is that a dictionary which seeks to meet the needs of a translator s text production should
focus on the aspects which characterize technical texts from the point of view of translation itself, that is, it should
describe and propose translation equivalents or suggestions for the Specialized Translation Units (STUs)
occurring in these texts, which the translator in the area often comes across in her/his practice, whether they are
terminological or not. Corpus Linguistics (CL), an empirical approach which regards language as a probabilistic
system, has devoted itself to the identification of recurring lexico-grammatical patterns in language by observing
authentic texts organized as electronic corpora. It is, therefore, the field of studies we deem capable of providing
the most adequate theoretical and methodological support to extract the STUs from real texts. In order to
embrace these units, a proposal of an online bidirectional English-Portuguese dictionary is presented, which is
aimed at the technical Culinary translator. The steps followed in the development of this study were organized in
six chapters. The first deals with the theoretical and practical aspects of technical translation and discusses the
role of terminology in translation practice. The second examines the specificities of the Culinary translator s job in
Brazil and characterizes the culinary recipe , the focus of this study, in terms of text genre and typology. In the
third chapter, the theoretical and methodological foundations of CL are presented, as well as the criteria used in
the compilation of the corpus to be used for the identification of the STUs. Chapter IV describes the exploration
of this corpus: first, we present the study in which a manual search of lexico-grammatical patterns using the
WordSmith Tools program is carried out; next, a methodology for semi-automatic extraction of STUs in the
corpus is described. Chapter V presents our proposal for a bidirectional online Culinary Dictionary for
Translators, describing its macro- and microstructure. Chapter VI contains the final considerations. The results
obtained in this study bear witness to the fact that CL, if used not only as a methodology, but as a theoretical
approach in the investigation of specialized corpora, enables the production of more useful and trustworthy
dictionaries for the translator, for it takes into account any association patterns between words with a probability
of occurrence in representative texts in the field a fact which strongly supports the inclusion of these patterns in a
dictionary aimed at the translator-producer-of-texts