Using a Parallel Corpus in Translation Practice and Research
Ana Frankenberg‐Garcia · 2006
There are so many variables underlying translation that examining anything longer than a few paragraphs of translated text at a time can become quite a daunting task.Using the technology of corpus linguistics, however, it is possible to analyse enormous quantities of translated text in unprecedented ways.A parallel language corpus, i.e., a computerized collection of texts in one language aligned with their translations into another language, can provide automatic access to countless features of translated texts that up to now have not been possible to study in a systematic way.COMPARA, a translation tool developed by Linguateca 1 , is the largest public, edited online parallel corpus of English and Portuguese in the world.In its current version 7.04, it provides access to almost three million words of original and translated fiction published in Portuguese and English.The aim of this presentation is to offer a brief description of the corpus and to demonstrate how it can be used in translation practice and research.