Viewing languages through multilingual corpora, with special reference to the generic person in English, German, and Norwegian

This paper explores three types of correspondence relations in a multilingual translation corpus: translations, sources, and parallels. German structures of the type man sieht, with the generic subject man and a perception verb, are compared with (1) their translations into English and Norwegian, (2) the sources in English and Norwegian texts which give rise to such structures in German translations, and (3) the parallel translations in English and Norwegian where German man is introduced in the translation from the other language. Although similar means are available in the three languages, there are important differences, particularly between German and English. For German and Norwegian the three correspondence relations produce the same overall pattern, for German and English the patterns vary greatly with the type of correspondence relation. The multilingual comparison throws the characteristics of the languages into relief, so that we can see similarities and differences more clearly and in more detail.