Seeing through Multilingual Corpora

Through electronic corpora we can observe patterns which we were unaware of before or only vaguely glimpsed. The availability of multilingual corpora has led to a renewal of contrastive studies. We gain new insight into similarities and differences between languages, at the same time as the characteristics of each language are brought into relief. The present book focuses on the work in building and using the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. Case studies are reported on lexis, grammar, and discourse. A concluding chapter sums up problems and prospects of corpus-based contrastive studies, including applications in lexicography, translator training, and foreign-language teaching. Though the main focus is on English and Norwegian, the approach should be of interest more generally for corpus-based contrastive research and for language studies in general. Seeing through corpora we can see through language.

May L-Y Wong, University of Hong Kong, in Target 21(1), 2009:
Johansson shows that multilingual corpora and the findings of multilingual corpus research are of great value to constrastive studies and beyond, and this book is a fascinating contribution to the contrastive analysis of languages and languages in general.