Some ways of looking into a multilingual corpus

Abstract

In recent years there has been a fast increasing interest in multilingual corpora. What is the relevance of multilingual corpora in linguistic research? As I see it, they are important for a number of reasons: · They make it possible to compare languages in a systematic manner, including preferences in language use. · The comparison throws the characteristics of the individual languages into relief and gives evidence of typological as well as of universal features. · Multilingual corpora consisting of original texts and their translations provide a way of making meaning visible. · They can be used to reveal characteristics of translated vs. original texts. · They allow applications in foreign-language teaching, lexicography, translator training, and language engineering. In my talk I will report on work we have done at the University of Oslo. The focus will be on ways of looking into a multilingual corpus (for more detail, see Johansson 1998 and 2007).