The German - English Translation Corpus

When cognitive structures (partly) overlap

This project is based on a corpus of English and German source and target texts, ranging from contemporary British/American literature to scientific textbooks. It aims at creating a machine-readable and aligned corpus which will allow us to discover and categorise translation equivalents for a number of linguistic items, such as prepositions, function verbs, deictic elements, metaphors or culture-specific structures. On this basis we look for regularities in the configuration of factors which influence equivalent choices for each of the phenomena in question.

Apart from theoretical insights into contrastive language structures as well as cognitive aspects of the translation process, research results could, for instance, be applied to bilingual lexicography or other language learning and translation aids. One example of such a learning tool is the corpus-based contrastive Chemnitz Internet Grammar.

The analysis of the corpus is undertaken in cooperation with the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge (Dr. Kirsten Malmkjaer): Our research partners' experience in translation studies will bring a stimulating input into differences between closely related languages. The special interest of the project lies in two parallel projects analysing English-Swedish (Lund) and English-Norwegian language (Oslo/Bergen) structures, so that English is studied in contrast to three Germanic languages in the same methodological framework.

Parts of the English-German translation corpus is now available online for research purposes only. Go to the Chemnitz Internet Grammar and check the access to the online corpus: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/InternetGrammar/.