English-Ukrainian Parallel Corpus: Prerequisites for Building and Practical Use in Translation Studies

Abstract

Consistent demand for highly professional translators determines continuous attempts of researchers and programmers to develop and propose reliable tools for both improvement of translation quality and facilitation of translators’ work. Last ten years have brought the parallel and comparable corpora into the focus of Ukrainian scientists’ attention. The aim of the paper is to specify the prerequisites for building the English-Ukrainian parallel corpus and describe its application in Translation Studies. A parallel corpus as a separate type of linguistic corpora cannot be built without alignment that enables placing and extracting corresponding sentences/paragraphs of source and target texts in one space. To create parallel corpora, it is necessary to perform additional text preparation. The Sketch Engine system (an example of a web-oriented system for work with corpora) can offer the solution for annotation with Excel. However, Sketch Engine lacks artificial intelligence techniques for further word processing. There is probability that employment of a neural network in the future will enable text alignment in parallel corpora instead of system users. Data from parallel corpora can be used in translation lexicography, comparative lexico-grammatical works, studies in the theory and practice of translation, language teaching, and development of machine translation systems. Corpus-based translation analysis is extremely relevant to identifying translation solutions that can only be explored on the basis of translation products. It is stipulated by rather frequent absence of dictionary equivalents in most contexts and ready evidence of possible translation variants in parallel corpora that provide the usage of a language unit in a wide range of contexts.