Comparable or Parallel Corpora?
Wolfgang Teubert · International Journal of Lexicography · 1996
The close inter-relationship of multilingual lexicography and computation with regard to the future of translation is discussed. Translation into and out of the translator's native language will benefit from multilingual corpora. Far from making multilingual lexicography obsolete, such corpora will considerably improve dictionaries and other tools. Although progress in computer translation has been impressive, further improvement depends upon re-analysing the languages involved from scratch with the aid of multilingual corpora. The question of the relative merits of comparable and parallel corpora is considered and it is seen that there are advantages to both, and therefore advantages to combining the two in any methodology for building up a multilingual database. Such a methodology is described, and the example given of an investigation into diary and its translation equivalents in German.