Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies presents readers with up-to-date research in corpus-based contrastive linguistics and translation studies, showing the high degree of complementarity between the two fields in terms of research methodology, interests and objectives. Offering theoretical, descriptive and applied perspectives, the articles show how translation and contrastive approaches to grammar, lexis and discourse can be harmoniously combined through the use of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual corpora and how contrastive information needs to inform translation research and vice versa. The notion of contrastive linguistics adopted here is broad; thus, alongside comparisons of Malay/English idioms and the French imparfait and its English equivalents, there are articles comparing different varieties of French, and sign language with spoken language. This collection should be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation studies. In addition, the section on corpus-based teaching applications will be of great value to teachers of translation and contrastive linguistics.

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.

The current book contains a selection of papers which focus on corpora and translation research in the digital age, outlining some recent advances and explorations.

Contrastive studies have experienced a dramatic revival in the last decades. By combining the methodological advantages of computer corpus linguistics and the possibility of contrasting texts in two or more languages, the structure and use of languages can be explored with greater accuracy, detail and empirical strength than before. The approach has also proved to have fruitful practical applications in a number of areas such as language teaching, lexicography, translation studies and computer-aided translation. This volume contains twelve studies comparing linguistic phenomena in English and seven other languages. The topics range from comparisons of specific lexical categories and word combinations to syntactic constructions and discourse phenomena such as cohesion and thematic structure. The studies highlight similarities and differences in the use, semantics and functions of the compared items, as well as the emergence of new meanings and language change. The emphasis varies from purely linguistic studies to those focusing on practical applications.

Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies provides a clear and practical introduction to using corpora in these fields. Giving special attention to parallel corpora, which are collections of texts in two or more languages, and demonstrating the potential benefits for multilingual corpus linguistics research to both translators and researchers, this book: explores the different types of parallel corpora available, and shows how to use basic and advanced search procedures to analyse them; explains how to compile a parallel corpus, and discusses their uses for translation purposes and to research linguistic phenomena across languages; demonstrates the use of corpus extracts across a wide range of texts, including dictionaries, novels by authors including Jane Austen and Mikhail Bulgakov, and newspapers such as The Sunday Times; is illustrated with case studies from a range of languages including Finnish, Russian, English and French. Written by two experienced researchers and practitioners, Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies is essential reading for postgraduate students and researchers working within the area of translation and contrastive studies.

Working with Specialized Language: a practical guide to using corpora introduces the principles of using corpora when studying specialized language. The resources and techniques used to investigate general language cannot be easily adopted for specialized investigations. This book is designed for users of language for special purposes (LSP). Providing guidelines and practical advice, it enables LSP users to design, build and exploit corpus resources that meet their specialized language needs. Highly practical and accessible, the book includes exercises, a glossary and an appendix describing relevant resources and corpus-analysis software. Working with Specialized Language is ideal for translators, technical writers and subject specialists who are interested in exploring the potential of a corpus-based approach to teaching and learning LSP.

This book is concerned with cross-linguistic contrast of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet genetically different world languages. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The main theme of this book lies in its focus on cross-linguistic contrast of aspect-related grammatical categories, or, grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning – both situation aspect at the semantic level and viewpoint aspect at the grammatical level – in English and Chinese. The unique strength of this volume lies in that it is first corpus-based book contrasting English and Chinese. Given that the state of the art in language studies is to use corpora, the significance of the marriage between contrastive studies and the corpus methodology in this book is not to be underestimated.

This book takes a corpus-based approach, which integrates translation studies and contrastive analysis, to the study of translational language. It presents the world’s first balanced corpus of translational Chinese, which, in combination with a comparable native Chinese corpus, provides a reliable empirical basis for a comprehensive account of the macro-statistic, lexical, and grammatical features of translational Chinese in English-to-Chinese translation – a significant contribution to Descriptive Translation Studies. The research findings based on these two distinctly different languages have important implications for universal translation research on the European tradition.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies provides a clear and practical introduction to using corpora in these fields. Giving special attention to parallel corpora, which are collections of texts in two or more languages, and demonstrating the potential benefits for multilingual corpus linguistics research to both translators and researchers, this book: explores the different types of parallel corpora available, and shows how to use basic and advanced search procedures to analyse them; explains how to compile a parallel corpus, and discusses their uses for translation purposes and to research linguistic phenomena across languages; demonstrates the use of corpus extracts across a wide range of texts, including dictionaries, novels by authors including Jane Austen and Mikhail Bulgakov, and newspapers such as The Sunday Times; is illustrated with case studies from a range of languages including Finnish, Russian, English and French. Written by two experienced researchers and practitioners, Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies is essential reading for postgraduate students and researchers working within the area of translation and contrastive studies.