Chapter published in:
Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies: New resources and applications
Edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 90] 2019
► pp. 19–38

Comparable parallel corpora

A critical review of current practices in corpus-based translation studies

| Møreforsking Molde, Norway
Are papers presented in corpus-based translation studies truly scientific? These are normally done on only one language pair, often on purpose-made parallel corpora, and can normally not be replicated. Therefore their value is limited in a strictly scientific sense. The use of comparable parallel corpora allows both for the replication of studies, and the testing of complex hypotheses like Halverson’s Gravitational Pull hypothesis. This chapter defines and discusses the concept of comparable parallel corpora, and exemplifies their value by illustrating their use. The chapter also presents hopes for the future, as new groundbreaking technology that will allow the linguist to create her own parallel corpora without the aid of computer scientists is currently being launched at the University of León in Spain.
Keywords: comparable parallel corpora, the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis, unique items
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Comparable parallel corpora
  • 3.Universals of translation
  • 4.What makes parallel corpora comparable, and does size matter?
  • 5.The sampling challenge of the NSPC
  • 6.Testing of the gravitational pull hypothesis
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.90.02har
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