Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies

Book excerpt: This volume assesses the state of the art of parallel corpus research as a whole, reporting on advances in both recent developments of parallel corpora – with some particular references to comparable corpora as well– and in ways of exploiting them for a variety of purposes. The first part of the book is devoted to new roles that parallel corpora can and should assume in translation studies and in contrastive linguistics, to the usefulness and usability of parallel corpora, and to advances in parallel corpus alignment, annotation and retrieval. There follows an up-to-date presentation of a number of parallel corpus projects currently being carried out in Europe, some of them multimodal, with certain chapters illustrating case studies developed on the basis of the corpora at hand. In most of these chapters, attention is paid to specific technical issues of corpus building. The third part of the book reflects on specific applications and on the creation of bilingual resources from parallel corpora. This volume will be welcomed by scholars, postgraduate and PhD students in the fields of contrastive linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, language teaching and learning, machine translation, and natural language processing.