GENTT’s main focus is the multilingual study of genres in professional legal,medical and technical contexts. Its aim is to identify genre conventions by means ofa hypothetical deductive approach using corpus technologies. The project hasfocused on compiling a multilingual (Catalan, English, German, Spanish andFrench) annotated corpus of specialized discourse texts that could prove useful totranslators and writers of professional texts, providing them with text models andpatterns to be used as textual, conceptual, linguistic and terminological reference.The corpus design is also intended to create a knowledge management system,similar to terminological knowledge representation systems, structured around thenotion of genre, for both translators and writers of professional texts (Borja, 2005).The interdisciplinary approach adopted by the GENTT research group assumes thatspecialized writers and translators need information of three kinds: conceptual,textual and linguistic (García and Monzó, 2004). When in possession of thisinformation, they can progressively improve their professional competence, bothlinguistic and extralinguistic, using a self-taught process.This research applies an interdisciplinary approach: functional linguistics (GarcíaIzquierdo, 2000), genre analysis theory applied to specialized discourse (Borja,2000) and sociology of professions (Monzó, 2002). The GENTT group understandsthe concept of genre as a product, i.e. as a successful achievement of a specificcommunicative purpose which is characterized by its conventionality, restrictionsand typicality (Bazerman, 1999). Following Bekenkotter and Huckin (1994), wealso understand genres as devices which we use to package our speech and make ita recognizable response to the demands of a given situation. But we also see genreas a process, a social construct that gradually emerges, evolves and disappearsaccording to communicative needs (Bhatia, 2004).
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