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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Exploiting the Incomparability of Comparable Corpora for Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies

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For empirical research in translation studies and contrastive linguistics comparability across languages is an important and non-trivial issue, particularly, if we aim at quantifying differences and commonalities. We approach this problem by investigating the CroCo Corpus of English and German originals and translations in eight different registers concentrating on the (in)comparability of the different subcorpora. They are comparable across languages but incomparable in terms of functional, i.e. register, variation. A feature matrix is analysed to reveal differences and commonalities between the bilingually comparable texts (i.e. English and German originals) and the monolingually comparable texts (originals and translations in the same language). The study draws on deep, multilayer annotation and sophisticated querying methods to quantify the features. The interpretation is based on a statistical analysis of the query results enabling to bridge the gap between qualitative properties of the language systems involved and their quantitative instantiations in texts.