Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis

This volume deals with different aspects of the creation and use of multilingual corpora. The term 'multilingual corpus' is understood in a comprehensive sense, meaning any systematic collection of empirical language data enabling linguists to carry out analyses of multilingual individuals, multilingual societies or multilingual communication. The individual contributions are thus concerned with a variety of spoken and written corpora ranging from learner and attrition corpora, language contact corpora and interpreting corpora to comparable and parallel corpora. The overarching aim of the volume is first to take stock of the variety of existing multilingual corpora, documenting possible corpus designs and uses, second to discuss methodological and technological challenges in the creation and analysis of multilingual corpora, and third to provide examples of linguistic analyses that were carried out on the basis of multilingual corpora.

Ali Karakas, University of Southampton, on Linguist List 24.2603, 2013:
This collection of multilingual corpora studies, above all, appeals to a wide readership interested in multilingualism and corpus linguistics. In addition, anyone who is to some extent interested in languages or linguistic studies may find the book useful, as it covers a wide range of areas related to linguistics such as contact situation, interpretation and translation studies and language learning process in terms of various language levels and sub-levels (e.g. spoken and written modes, pronunciation, written essays, etc.). The volume differs from related collections, which focus only one aspect of bilingual corpora on certain languages (e.g. Johansson, 2007, which focuses on the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus), or just one level and sub-level of language (e.g. Teubert, 2007, which deals with bilingual and multilingual lexicography and, annotation issues). Thus, this volume fills a gap in the literature of multilingualism and corpus linguistics. Another important aspect of the volume is that it includes studies on both small and large corpora and studies that deal with both the creation and analysis of multilingual corpora. The editors’ objectives of (i) introducing the audience to a large number of available multilingual corpora, (ii) raising issues frequently encountered in the methodological and technological aspects of corpus creation, and (iii) presenting a selection of linguistics analyses drawn from multilingual corpora clearly appear to have been achieved.