Paper short abstract:

This presentation will introduce the background to the development of the Japanese-English parallel corpus online search tool "Parallel Link" developed by the author, and its potential applications using the compilation of Japanese-English dictionaries as an example.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will first introduce the history of the Japanese-English parallel corpora released to date and their linguistic applications with several examples. Then, it will present the background and procedures to developing the Japanese-English parallel corpus online search tool "Parallel Link" developed by the author (e.g., text processing, annotation, creation of full-text search indexes, and file organization applied to these parallel corpora).

Next, I will show its potential applications using the compilation of Japanese-English dictionaries as an example. In particular, I will present concrete data on improving the Japanese-English dictionary description of the Japanese verbs 'Katameru' and 'Tateru' as examples. The basic data are extracted from a general-reference corpus of Japanese, Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), as a benchmark of Japanese usage, and also from Japanese-English parallel corpora in Parallel Link, to check the authentic Japanese-English translation units. These data are examined across semantic categories as well as descriptive grammar and frequencies, which are then compared with the descriptions present in the several current Japanese-English dictionaries. The presentation will finally highlight an original sample manuscript based on the corpus-driven approach, to show the feasibility of utilizing parallel corpora in the bilingual dictionary compilation in the future.