Corpus in “Natural” Language Versus “Translation” Language: LBC Corpora, A Tool for Bilingual Lexicographic Writing

We illustrate the different questions with the SketchEngine LBC French corpus, made up at the moment of 3,000,000 words. Our particular interest here is in research that not only orients lexical choices for translators but that also precedes the selection of bilingual quotations (from our Italian/French parallel corpus) and that we rely on for editing an optional element of the file called “translation notes.” We will rely on this as much for works on “universals of translation” already described by Baker (Corpus linguistics and translation studies. Implications and applications. In Baker M et al (eds) Text and technology. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp 233–250 (1993)) as for studies aimed at improving translation quality assessment (TQA). We will show how a targeted consultation of different corpora and subcorpora that the database allows us to distinguish (“natural language” vs “translation,” “technical texts” vs “popularization texts” or “literary texts”) can help us identify approximations or translation errors, so as to build quality comparative lexicographical information.