A Corpus-driven contrastive English-Spanish: characterization in English and Spanish

Abstract

The University of León has been engaged for several years now in a wide-reaching project on corpus-driven Contrastive Analysis (henceforth CA) involving two languages: English and Spanish. There are several communicative areas on which contrastive work is currently being done. These areas are chosen among those semantic functions whose representation in English grammar is particularly conflictive when translating into Spanish. The project is aimed at the setting up of manuals and other resources dealing with English-Spanish contrastive studies focused on corpus-driven data. The possible applicability of this project are mainly directed towards the improvement of Translator Training and Translation Practice, as well as to the development of Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) in Spain. Due to the non-existence of a sufficiently representative English-Spanish translation corpus, the research project is based on two monolingual corpora: Cobuild/Bank of English and the Spanish CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual). Both are corpora of the general language in use, and they provide essential information for the development of our project. The present paper will deal with how the planning for this particular project on characterisation in English and Spanish is designed and set up. There are several stages that must always be fulfilled in all the areas the study is going to cover. This is a proposal of the outline the final project will have.