Equivalence and Non-equivalence in Parallel Corpora

The present paper shows how an aligned parallel corpus can be used to investigate the consistency of translation equivalence across the two languages in a parallel corpus. The particular issues addressed are the bidirectionality of translation equivalence, the coverage of multiword units, and the amount of implicit knowledge presupposed on the part of the user in interpreting the data. Three lexical items belonging to different word classes were chosen for analysis: the noun head, the verb give, and the preposition with. George Orwell’s novel 1984 was used as source material as it available in English-Hungarian sentence-aligned form. It is argued that the analysis of translation equivalents displayed in sets of concordances with aligned sentences in the target language holds important implications for bilingual lexicography and automatic word alignment methodology.