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Explicitation 147
3. Methods
3.1 Selection, structure and size of the corpus
The corpus assembled for this investigation (hereafter referred to as the
ARRABONA corpus) consists of three sub-corpora put together from literary
(L) and non-literary (N-L) texts (technical writing) written between
1969 and 1999:
1. the sub-corpus of original texts in English (OEC) is comprised of 8 texts
written by British, American and Canadian writers,
2. the sub-corpus of their translations into Hungarian (THC) includes
texts produced by professional translators and published by established
publishing houses,
3. the sub-corpus of original texts in Hungarian (OHC) is made up of 8
comparable texts written in the same period (for the list of texts included
see Appendix 1).
Figure 1 shows that these sub-corpora are designed to constitute a parallel
(EHC) and a monolingual comparable corpus (HHC):
EHC
HHC
OEC
THC
OHC
L
N-L
L
N-L
L
N-L
Figure 1. The structure of the ARRABONA corpus. A parallel corpus (EHC) & a
comparable corpus (HHC)
The texts for this investigation were selected from a period spanning 30
years beginning in the late 70s and early 80s. The starting dates were mainly
motivated by the intention to represent the period in which traditional Hungarian
publishing standards were still at work. Existence of English translations
of the Hungarian non-translated texts was another criterion for the selection
of the original Hungarian works, which enables one to extend the analysis at a
later time.
When selecting the texts for investigation, the overall intention and the
main theoretical consideration was to achieve the highest possible variety