Parallelkorpora: Ergänzung oder Ersatz bilingualer Wörterbücher? Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der didaktischen Nutzung von Parallelkorpora vs. bilingualen Wörterbüchern für den Fremdsprachenunterricht

Abstract

Abstract: This paper explores the question of how parallel corpora -collections of original texts and their translations, typically aligned at sentence level- can beneficially assume the functions that bilingual dictionaries have performed so far in foreign language and translation teaching. Based on the observation that the use of bilingual online dictionaries has declined significantly in recent years in favour of new applications such as Linguee or Reverso, the article analyses this process and points out new avenues that have been opened up in the search for a translation equivalent. After some reflections on bilingual dictionaries, an overview is given of the ad-vantages of working with parallel corpora. Afterwards, the language-didactic principle behind the use of corpora in foreign language teaching will be explained: the DDL (data-driven learn-ing) approach, which, for years in research on foreign language didactics, has particularly em-phasized the advantages of inductive learning. In doing so, I will also use examples from the parallel corpus German / Spanish PaGeS (www.corpuspages.eu) to show how the direct use of parallel corpora in foreign language teaching is completely in line with the DDL approach. Final-ly, two dictionaries -LEO and Pons- will be compared with the PaGeS corpus through a case study on collocations and, as a conclusion, an answer to the question formulated in the title will be given.