Parallel Concordancing and Translation
M. G. BARLOW · 2004
Parallel concordance software provides a general purpose tool that permits a wide range of investigations of translated texts, from the analysis of bilingual terminology and phraseology to the study of alternative translations of a single text. A parallel concordancer can be used to provide information about translation on demand and can provide a much richer picture than that presented in a bilingual dictionary. It is also possible to use parallel corpora to investigate specialized or technical usage information or to examine usage in particular genres. The software can present the user with (i) several instances of the search term and (ii) a large context for each instance of the search term, thereby allowing a thorough analysis of usage, either in terms of the equivalences between two languages or the ways in which specific translation problems have been handled by individual translators. In other the software can either be used to analyse millions of words of translated texts or to examine one or more translations of a particular text. This paper outlines the main features of a Windows concordancer, ParaConc, focussing on alignment of parallel (translated) texts, general search procedures, identification of translation equivalents, and the furnishing of basic frequency information. Some advantages and disadvantages of using a parallel concordancer are discussed. ParaConc accepts up to four parallel texts, which might be four different languages or an original text plus three different translations. A semi-automatic alignment utility is included in the program to prepare texts that are not already pre-aligned. Simple text searches for words or phrases can be performed and the resulting concordance lines can be sorted according to the alphabetical order of the words surrounding the searchword. More complex searches are also possible, including context searches, searches based on regular expressions, and word/part-of-speech searches (assuming that the corpus is tagged for POS). Corpus frequency and collocate frequency information can be obtained. The program includes features for highlighting potential translations, including an automatic component Hot words, which uses frequency information to provide information about possible translations of the searchword.