Design, compilation and applications of an English-Polish-Belarusian Parallel Literary Corpus

Abstract

The main goal of the project is to create the English-Polish-Belarusian Literary Parallel Corpus (EPB corpus) and present its applications in several linguistic disciplines, including translation studies and discourse analysis. The thesis provides an outline of corpus linguistics research and corpus linguistics as a methodology, then addresses the problem of the differences in the development of corpus linguistics in the three languages: English (as a lingua franca), Polish (a statutory national language) and Belarusian (a minority language). The analysis of available tools and resources for each of these languages proves the need for the EPB corpus in order to develop useful new resources for Belarusian in particular.A substantial part of the thesis presents the documentation of the process of creating the corpus. Various aspects of corpus design, text collection and text encoding are discussed in the context of the availability and usability of numerous tools. Special attention is paid to the tools specifically designed for each language and to the solutions that enable the data processed by these tools to be merged.Using corpus linguistics techniques (e.g. linguistic distribution, lexical density, vector-based semantic similarity measures) the thesis goes on to explore the application of the EPB corpus in investigating translation universals, in exploring the dependency between the author’s and the translator’s style, in supporting translation students and professionals, and in analysis of gender discourse. These case studies clearly show the practical value of the resource.Finally, the thesis provides a detailed overview of the plans and possibilities for further development of the project in the broader context of the evolution of Polish and Belarusian corpus linguistics.