Michael Barlow

Bilingual concordancers and translation memories: a comparative evaluation

Translators are increasingly turning to electronic language resources and tools to help them cope with the demand for fast, high-quality translation. While translation memory tools seem to be well known in the translation industry at large, bilingual concordancers appear to be familiar primarily in academic circles. The strengths and weaknesses of these two types of tool are analyzed in an effort to recommend those circumstances in which each could best be applied.

Agreement as a Discourse Phenomenon

Agreement is widely considered to be the prime example of a relation based on linguistic form in which the morphosyntactic specification of one category, such as a subject noun phrase, is redundantly expressed on a separate category such as a verb. In this paper, I discuss the problems inherent in such morphosyntactic accounts of agreement and argue that the consideration of a range of attested agreement patterns leads naturally to an account in which agreement relations are seen as links between discourse information structures. Taking a discourse perspective avoids the descriptive problems associated with current syntactic approaches to agreement and leads to a revealing reconsideration of the nature of agreement relations