Comparing Bilingual Dictionaries with a Parallel Corpus

Abstract

1 Abstract This paper investigates how translation equivalents in French-English bilingual dictionaries compare with equivalents found in a parallel corpus of French and English texts. A method for measuring the degree of mismatch is proposed, based on the distinction between BASIC TRANSLATION EQUIVALENCE and RICH TRANSLATION EQUIVALENCE. The method is potentially automatable and is intended to help lexicographers focus their application ofparallel corpora in the most useful way. We make some suggestions about how to incorporate rich translation equivalence into bilingual dictionaries.