Analysing the English-Xhosa parallel corpus of technical texts with Paraconc: a case study of term formation processes

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show how corpus-based research, using computer tools can contribute to the development of technical terminology for Xhosa by translators. Paraconc has been used in analysing a parallel corpus of English-Xhosa texts. Paraconc is a parallel concordancer which makes it easy to analyse translated texts. This software program was developed by Michael Barlow (1995, 2003). He designed this software for linguists and translators who wish to work with translated texts. The alignment process, which is very important for the successful operation of this software, creates links between the source text and the target text. Some screenshots which show alignment of texts at sentence level, merging and splitting of sentences, word frequency lists, parallel concordances, etc. are cited. The author further demonstrates how parallel concordancing, and to a lesser extent, sentence alignment in Paraconc, have been used for identifying terms in the English-Xhosa Parallel Corpus.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(2): 183–205