Parallel Corpora for Meaning/Sense Discrimination in Translation and Bilingual Lexicography

Document Type : .

Authors

1 PhD Student of Translation Studies, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor of Linguistics, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to propose a practical and corpus-based solution for the problems of meaning discrimination and equivalent selection by the application of Hartmann’s Contrastive Textology Theory (1980) and the use of parallel corpora in the process of translation, and secondly, extending it to the compilation of bilingual dictionaries. It also aims to suggest the most reliable way of finding the best equivalents of lexical items and their different meanings in various contexts. To that end, the researchers used primarily Mizan Persian-English Parallel Corpus and secondly TEP (Tehran English-Persian Parallel Corpus) to prepare the required bilingual corpora. The two available corpora are the most suitable and appropriate for the research purposes respectively. Firstly, one hundred polysemous content words were chosen by the researchers from both corpora as search words that are to be selected based on frequency word lists provided by Wordsmith as the corpus analysis tool. Secondly, these words are searched in the English corpus and different Persian equivalents of them are found and extracted from the aligned sentences in the parallel corpora where various meanings and senses of the search words are shown. Thirdly, the found Persian equivalents are collected and listed in tables. Finally, the Persian translations and equivalents in the parallel corpora are compared with Persian equivalents in Farhang Moaser English-Persian Millennium Dictionary that is a famous bilingual English-Persian dictionary to see which source (parallel corpora or bilingual dictionary) provides translators with more comprehensive and detailed equivalents based on the linguistic context. The findings suggest that in most cases the two translation corpora which do not have that much size and scope provide translators and lexicographers with more different and diverse meanings compared to the investigated dictionary.

Keywords

Language and Linguistics
Volume 18, Issue 36
October 2023
Pages 245-267

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics