Translation corpora in contrastive research, translation and language learning

Abstract

This article looks at the role of translation corpora in all fields of comparative language studies. Over the last decade, corpus linguistics has expanded into a new, powerful and easily accessible methodology, which has brought new impulses to many older sub-disciplines of linguistics. Thus, translation corpora have revitalised all comparative or cross-language studies, since they can be used profitably in contrastive linguistics and translation studies as well as in language teaching and learning. Translation corpus studies are particularly popular among non-native speakers of English, as they offer a sound basis for language analysis that does not depend on introspection. Because they combine a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, they are particularly interesting for gradient phenomena, like the auxiliary-catenative-full verb cline that provides the empirical test field in much of this contribution. The opportunities offered by translation corpora are illustrated using examples from the Chemnitz English-German translation corpus, mainly in three case studies of auxiliary help, catenative appear/seem, and modal may/might.