Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2013

Europarl is a large multilingual corpus containing the minutes of the debates at the European Parliament. This article presents a method to extract different corpora from Europarl: monolingual and multilingual comparable corpora, as well as parallel corpora. Using state-of-the-art measures of homogeneity, we show that these corpora are very similar. In addition, we argue that they present many advantages for research in various fields of linguistics and translation studies, and we also discuss some of their limitations. We conclude by reviewing a number of previous studies that made use of these corpora, emphasizing in each case the possibilities offered by Europarl.

In this paper we investigate the differences in risk-averse behavior in translated versus non-translated texts by comparing lexical normalization in various registers of translated and non-translated Dutch. We want to verify: (i) to what extent normalization is register dependent; (ii) whether normalizing behavior is similar in translated and non-translated texts of the same register, and (iii) to what extent normalization is source-language dependent. We relied on the Dutch Parallel Corpus to investigate the dispersion of 10 profiles, i.e. sets of synonymous lexical alternatives consisting of a Standard Dutch and a Belgian Standard Dutch alternative. Using an exploratory, multivariate technique we visualized and measured the degrees to which a number of registers of translated and non-translated Dutch conform to linguistic norms.

The aim of the article is to complement a quantitative study on existential constructions in French and English, both in translated and original texts and based on the exploitation of comparable corpora (Cappelle & Loock 2013). What this article shows is that such an overall quantitative approach should be complemented with a more qualitative approach, for two main reasons: (i) overall quantitative results provide only a general view on the differences between translated texts and original texts, hiding subtle but crucial variations; (ii) the use of comparable corpora does not provide any information on the strategies used by translators and on the translation process itself. The article also provides suggestions for implications in translators training and translation quality assessment.

Multi-word lexical units can often be rendered by different lexicalizations in the target language. Variation in the translation of multi-word lexical units, specifically multi-word cognates, can be regarded as an indicator of interference, since there is evidence of a priming effect which leads to the production of such units in interlinguistic communication (Kroll & Stewart 1994). This paper studies the production of multi-word cognates, i.e. formally similar lexical items which are semantically equivalent in two languages, in ecological experimental translation based on real translation tasks in a classroom situation. For this purpose real text units and multiple-choice tasks are used, and the data thus obtained are compared with instances extracted from an English-Spanish comparable corpus of original texts and a Spanish corpus of translated text. The results show that there is a correlation between the spontaneous production of multi-word cognates, as evidenced experimentally, and their frequency as attested by corpora.

This article takes a composite approach that combines move analysis and multidimensional analysis to a contrastive study of textual variations in discourse moves between native and non-native English abstracts, focusing on the biology discipline. Building on a new multidimensional analysis model of English abstracts established in Cao & Xiao (2013), the present study demonstrates that in comparison with their Chinese counterparts, native English writers display a more active involvement and a more interactive style; and in all obligatory moves, they are also more focused and confident in using intensifying devices. Native and non-native abstracts differ significantly at both dimension level and move level. Such differences are discussed with reference to possible reasons and our suggestions for English abstract writing in China.