2. Interactive reference grammars: Exploiting parallel and comparable treebanks for translation
This paper discusses the role of annotated corpora as works of reference for grammatical translation problems. Within this context, the English-German CroCo Corpus and its multi-layer alignment and annotation are introduced. It is described how the corpus is exploited as interactive resource to display translation solutions for typologically problematic constructions. Additionally, the Penn and TiGer Treebanks are used as comparable corpora for English and German. The linguistic enrichment of the treebanks, i.e. their syntactic annotation, is described and corpus query techniques relevant for translation problems are shown. Relevant structures are extracted from the treebanks and translation candidates are displayed and discussed. The advantage of this technique is that translation solutions are extracted from published translations, i.e. language in use. Consequently, they are more comprehensive and inventive than dictionary entries or descriptions in grammars are. Treebanks could thus be used as an interactive reference grammar in translation education and practice.