Multiword expressions in comparable corpora

Abstract On the basis of Aranea Gigaword Web corpora, a family of comparable corpora intended for use in contrastive linguistic research, multilingual lexicography, language teaching and translation studies we discuss the pros and cons of comparable corpora in contrast to monolingual and parallel corpora for the analysis of multiword entities (MWEs). We demonstrate that by using large corpora for two or more languages, consisting of unrelated texts, yet created in a comparable manner, parallel language structures and phenomena like MWEs can be identified if the appropriate tools are employed. With the Aranea corpora, the “bilingual sketch” functionality of the Sketch Engine is one such tool which provides a new approach for analyses of similarities of (or differences between) collocation profiles (word sketches) for words and their translation equivalents.