Monthly Archives: July 2008

Parallel corpora

The name sounds fancy, but really the concept is simple. Most corpora are monolingual, but with parallel corpora, the texts have been translated so when you search for a term in one language, you can see the way that word has been translated into the other language(s).

If you want to play around with this, the link is http://www.let.rug.nl/~tiedeman/OPUS/.

Here is an example of searching for the English word ‘honey’ in TURkish:

tur
220 tatlım
29 hayatım
17 canım
14 Tatlım
5 Hayatım
4 bal

Now, if you click on a number beside the term you are interested in, you will get a listing of the original English text with ‘HONEY’ and the translation of that text.  In this case, I clicked on ’14’ to see how ‘Tatlim’ appeared with the English translations (from movie subtitles):

12162141 Oh , honey , you were incredible .
tur Tatlım , müthiştin .
14931248 – Honey , honey .
tur Tatlım , tatlım .
15944691 honey , let’ s go .
tur Tatlım , hadi gidelim , hadi gidelim , hadi gidelim .
16975602 Oh , honey , he was trying to save his pet .
tur Tatlım , hayvanını kurtarmaya çalışıyordu .
16983418 Hey , honey .
tur Hey , Tatlım !
16988175 That was sweet , honey .
tur Tatlım bu çok hoş .
17994433 Honey , honey , here .
tur Tatlım , tatlım , buraya koy .
25470953 I’ m so proud of you , honey … being out in the world like this .
tur Tatlım , seninle gurur duyuyorum — böyle bir dünyaya çıkışınla .
25471594 I’ m just waiting for you , honey .
tur Tatlım , ben sadece seni bekliyordum .
28966134 Honey , honey .
tur Tatlım , tatlım .

Also, if you click on any word in one of the foreign languages, you’ll see a list of the possible translations in English.  In this case, this is how Tatlim maps into English:

eng
220 honey
56 sweetheart
51 dear
51 sweetie
14 darling
8 baby
7 Honey
7 hon
2 now
2 Sweetheart