Volume 60, Issue 2

Parallel texts are texts in different languages that can be considered translational equivalent. We introduce the notion ‘massively parallel text’ for such texts that have translations into very many languages. In this introduction we discuss some massively parallel texts that might be used for the investigation of linguistic diversity. Further, a short summary of the articles in this issue is provided, finishing with a prospect on where the investigation of parallel texts might lead us.

This paper documents some of the experiences I have made in the course of my (areal) typological research projects. The empirical basis of these projects stems from the analysis of two large parallel literary corpora. The texts involved are original and translations of ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY'S Le petit prince and JOANNE ROWLING'S Harry Potter series. The paper addresses a selection of issues touching upon methodo-logical, theoretical and practical problems of this kind of corpus-based linguistic research. Parallel corpora offer interesting possibilities for typological research. However, working with parallel literary corpora often imposes severe restrictions upon sample size and sample composition as there is a clear European bias in terms of available translations.

In this paper, advantages and disadvantages of using parallel texts in typological studies are considered according to the criteria of diversity, domains, analysis, per-spective, quality, representativity, and comparability. It is shown in a case study of multi-verb constructions (including serial verb constructions, converb constructions, etc.) in two motion event domains (BRING and RUN) how typology can profit from parallel texts especially in the investigation of quantitative variables. A method is introduced to transform features with continuous distributions into ternary features with low, intermediate, and high values which can then be tested for correlations.

The aim of this paper is to show the usefulness of parallel texts for typological inves-tigations. In order to analyze the way in which demonstrative systems of the European languages function, two kinds of data have been considered: first, the results of a questionnaire based on situations represented in 48 pictures, which will be necessarily discussed only in a summarized way here. Second, and this will be the main topic of this paper, a corpus of parallel texts: the translations, in different languages of Europe, of the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets . Parallel texts have been used to verify the generalizations based on the data elicited through the questionnaire.

The use of the Bible in parallel text corpora poses special challenges for researchers. The purpose of this paper is to describe the specific nature of Bible translations that sets them apart from other parallel texts such as translations of Harry Potter or the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The special nature of translated Bibles is caused by textual multiplicity, canonical multiplicity and multiplicity of translation types. These three factors reflect one underlying cause, the specific skopos of Bibles: the religious functions of translated Bibles for a wide range of different Jewish and Christian communities.

We describe a method for the automatic alignment of parallel texts using co-occurrence statistics. The assumption of this approach is that words which are often found together are linked in some way. We employ this assumption to automatically suggest links between words in different languages, using Bible verses as information units. The result is a word-by-word alignment between different translations of the Bible. The accuracy of our method is evaluated by using Strong's numbers as a benchmark. Overall, the performance is high, indicating that this approach can be used to give an approximate gloss of Bible verses.

This rather programmatic paper discusses the use of parallel corpora in the typological study of grammatical categories. In the author's earlier work, tense-aspect categories were studied by means of a translational questionnaire, and cross-linguistic gramtypes were identified through their distribution in the questionnaire. It is proposed that a similar methodology could be applied to multilingual parallel corpora. The possibility of identifying grammatical markers by word-alignment methods is demonstrated with examples from Bible texts.