Bi-text Topography and Quantitative Approaches of Parallel Text Processing

International audienceThis paper presents a series of experiments devoted to the development of new tools for multilingual textometric exploration of translation corpora. I propose to use bi-text topography to facilitate the study of lexical equivalences on a quantitative basis. The map of parallel sections allows for the visualization of the corpus cut into corresponding sections by raising one (or several) characters to the rank of parallel section delimiters.The exploratory results show that the use of quantitative methods (characteristic elements computation, repeated segments extraction, multiple co-occurrences, etc.) in combination with bi-text topography offers new means for automatic description of lexical equivalences in translation corpora. The suggested approach opens up new horizons for interactive exploration of translation resources of multilingual texts in a variety of fields of study: translation, foreign language learning and teaching, bilingual terminology, lexicography, etc