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Parallel Corpora

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A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of parallel corpora, i.e. corpora containing source texts in a given language, aligned with their translations in another language. More specifically, it focuses on directional corpora, i.e. parallel corpora where the source and target languages are clearly identified. These types of corpora are widely used in contrastive linguistics and translation studies. The chapter first outlines the key features of parallel corpora (they typically contain written texts translated by expert translators working into their native language) and describes the main methods of parallel corpus analysis, including the combined use of parallel and comparable corpora. It then examines the major challenges that are linked with the design and analysis of parallel corpora, such as text availability, metadata collection, bitext alignment, and multilingual linguistic annotation, on the one hand, and data scarcity, interpretation of the results and infelicitous translations, on the other. Finally, the chapter shows how these challenges can be overcome, most notably by compiling balanced, richly-documented parallel corpora and by cross-fertilizing insights from cross-linguistic research and natural language processing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/diplo/int/. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  2. 2.

    https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/pleci.html. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  3. 3.

    https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/mult-ed.html. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  4. 4.

    https://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/translation-and-intercultural-studies/research/projects/translational-english-corpus-tec/. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  5. 5.

    Unsurprisingly, it is far from easy to obtain copyright clearance for texts to be included in parallel corpora. For this reason, many parallel corpora are not publicly available (e.g. ENPC, PLECI, Raf Salkie’s INTERSECT, P-ACTRES, CroCo).

  6. 6.

    http://nl.ijs.si/ME/V4/msd/html/index.html. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  7. 7.

    http://nl.ijs.si/spook/msd/html-en/. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  8. 8.

    http://universaldependencies.org/. Accessed 22 May 2019.

  9. 9.

    The practice of translating the European Parliament proceedings into all EU languages was ceased in the second half of 2011. The verbatim reports of the plenary sittings are still made available on the European Parliament website, but the written-up versions of the speeches are only published in the languages in which the speeches were delivered.

  10. 10.

    In this respect, it is important to stress that English is increasingly used as a lingua franca at the European Parliament. In other words, some of the speeches originally delivered in English are in fact given by non-native speakers of English (the same holds, albeit to a lesser extent, for other languages, such as French). This is not a trivial issue, as recent research indicates that the use of English as a Lingua Franca can have a considerable impact on translators’ (and interpreters’) outputs (see Albl-Mikasa 2017 for an overview of English as a Lingua Franca in translation and interpreting).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université catholique de Louvain, Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Marie-Aude Lefer

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  1. Marie-Aude Lefer
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Correspondence to Marie-Aude Lefer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. FNRS Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Language and Communication Institute, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Magali Paquot

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Stefan Th. Gries

Further Reading

Further Reading

  • Johansson, S. 2007. Seeing through Multilingual Corpora. On the use of corpora in contrastive studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Johansson’s monograph is a must-read for anyone interested in corpus-based contrastive linguistics. The book provides a highly readable introduction to corpus design and use in contrastive linguistics. It also offers a range of exemplary case studies contrasting lexis, syntax, and discourse on the basis of parallel corpus data.

  • Mikhailov, M., and Cooper, R. 2016. Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies. A guide for research . London/New York: Routledge.

In this accessible guide for research, Mikhailov & Cooper provide detailed information on parallel corpus compilation and describe a wide range of search procedures that are commonly used in corpus-based contrastive and translation studies. The book also offers a useful survey of some of the available parallel corpora.

  • Zanettin, F. 2012. Translation-Driven Corpora. Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies . London/New York: Routledge.

Zanettin’s coursebook is a practical introduction to descriptive and applied corpus-based translation studies. In addition to providing clear background information on the study of translation features in the field, it offers a wealth of useful information on translation-driven (including parallel) corpus design, encoding, annotation, and analysis. Each chapter is enriched with insightful case studies and hands-on tasks.

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Lefer, MA. (2020). Parallel Corpora. In: Paquot, M., Gries, S.T. (eds) A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46216-1_12

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