Identification and Characterization of Nested Abbreviations in Scientific Discourse for Translation Purposes

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This Master’s Thesis aims to analyze nested abbreviations from a linguistic perspective; describing their morphological, syntactic and semantic features which can be applied for translation purposes. Nested abbreviations are considered as abbreviated forms, either initialisms or acronyms, which have within their meaning another abbreviation. 433 nested abbreviations were extracted from two specialized dictionaries in English. These dictionaries include fields such as Military Sciences, Molecular Biology, Medicine, Atmospheric Sciences, among others.This research was carried out during the second semester of year 2015 and the first semester of 2016 as part of the first cohort of the Master in Translation program of the University of Antioquia. Data processing involved identification of nested abbreviations in each dictionary, tokenization, morphosyntactic tagging and semantic classification of abbreviations and their definitions in order to undertake a linguistic description of the phenomenon. This study also includes the translation into Spanish of nested abbreviations extracted from corpus, the validation of these translations performed by three professional translators and, the syntactic analysis in both languages, English and Spanish. Data analysis showed that from the morphological and semantic perspective, nested abbreviations behave like regular abbreviations. Important differences were found from the syntactic perspective where nested abbreviations behave as premodifiers in the noun phrase (NP) 98.93% of cases. They are located as first premodifier 10.96% of times and second or further premodifier in 87.97% of cases. This means that conversion processes are present in over 95% of cases, where abbreviations behave functionally as adjectives regardless they are classified as nouns. As conclusions, this is the first time nested abbreviations are not only mentioned but also analyzed and defined. Furthermore, it was found that although the percentage of nested abbreviations obtained from the dictionaries is quite low, less than 1% of total abbreviations, it is highly relevant to study this phenomenon because nested abbreviation is a developing process which can continue to grow, as the amount of abbreviations in specialized languages does. Moreover, it is significant to increase knowledge of this special type of abbreviations in order to improve not only the performance of abbreviations recognition, extraction and disambiguation systems, but also the work of technical and scientific translators.