Symposium
CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS AND TRANSLATION STUDIES
EMPIRICAL APPROACHES
Université Catholique de Louvain
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
5-6 February, 1999
Introduction
Over the last few years an important change has taken place in research
into contrastive linguistics and translation studies. Whereas previously
both fields have drawn on largely introspective methodologies, most
research is now conducted on large bodies of bilingual or multilingual
data, a change which has had the important effect of providing the two
disciplines with a much more solid empirical basis.
Many researchers are now working with computerised data, in many cases
using specifically designed linguistic software tools to conduct automatic
or semi-automatic analyses. Bilingual concordancers are a case in point.
Research projects along these lines are becoming more widespread throughout
the academic community and initial results are highly encouraging,
revealing the enormous potential of computerised corpus analyses both for
contrastive linguistics and translation studies.
Of course many researchers are still opting to use purely manual methods of
analysis: indeed for many types of linguistic analysis (semantic or
discourse analysis for example), they will remain the only option for the
foreseeable future. It is also notable that there are very few bilingual
computer corpora available. For many therefore, the use of manual methods
may not be a question of choice.
This symposium is intended to bring together specialists in the fields of
contrastive linguistics and translation studies conducting research on
bilingual or multilingual corpora of any type. One important objective will
be to demonstrate to what extent detailed corpus analysis can support,
contradict or refine introspective contrastive analyses. Another key aim is
to examine the strengths and weaknesses of manual and automatic methods of
data analysis. And lastly, the meeting will provide a valuable opportunity
to exchange and share data, a step on the way to setting up an
international multilingual databank available to everyone working in the
field.
Symposium Topics
Below is a non-exhaustive list of subject areas which we hope to address
during the symposium:
- Contrastive lexicology (in particular, contrastive phraseology)
- Bilingual/multilingual lexicography
- Contrastive semantics
- Contrastive syntax
- Contrastive pragmatics
- Compiling and exploiting bilingual/multilingual computerised corpora
- Software tools for the analysis of bilingual corpora (bilingual
concordancing, automatic alignment, multilingual part-of-speech tagging,
etc.)
- Bilingual corpora and automatic/computer-aided translation
For more information, please send an email message to granger@lige.ucl.ac.be
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Professor Sylviane Granger
Université Catholique de Louvain
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
Collège Erasme
Place Blaise Pascal 1
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FLTR/GERM/ETAN/CECL/cecl.html