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Corpora, universals and interference 75
gather more data. Translation into Finnish is very much dominated by English
sources – in fact the literary genre is an exception, having by far the greatest
variety of SLs.
As pointed out above, there is no reliable measure of overall similarity
and difference between corpora. I therefore developed a tentative solution
for comparing the four subcorpora to one another, based on comparing
lexis on a rank order basis. The point of departure was a frequency-based
wordlist of each corpus. The lists consisted of individual word forms, not
lemmata. Lemmatisation seemed unnecessary, even pointless, since it is by
no means clear that great differences in the frequencies of typical forms are
trivial from the point of view of translation – quite the contrary, in a highly
inflectional language it can point to an untypical usage pattern (see, for
example, Mauranen 1999b).
Since the method of comparison needed for this study had no precedent
to go on, I started from some general principles that we already know from
corpus linguistics (for alternative solutions, see Jantunen, this volume). First,
the most frequent items in different reasonably-sized corpora tend to be fairly
consistently the same in a given language. In fact, frequent items can show
remarkable consistency even across highly unequal corpus sizes, up to a 100-
fold difference (see, e.g. Mauranen 1999b). Therefore, the fact that the Russian
SL subcorpus was only about two thirds the size of the others, should not
influence the results dramatically, especially as rank order is not very sensitive
to size. Second, fairly soon after the top frequency words, corpora begin to
show their differences, and the high frequencies peter out and tail off into a
very long list of few, finally single occurrences.
My solution was to try out three different frequency bands of thirty words
each; the first, from 1 to 30, the second from 50 to 79, and the third from 100 to
129 (with some adjustment on account of excluding proper names). The bands
were chosen conservatively in that they were all fairly high in frequency: this
meant it was possible that there would not be much variation. My assumption
was that given the distributions of monolingual corpora, there would be very
little variation in the top frequency band, somewhat more in the second, but
the last one which was picked from just below the 100 top frequency level,
would be the least predictable. I also assumed that the best guess for finding
meaningful variation would be in the middle band. Of course, although we
might reasonably expect this to be the case, the exact optimal place for the
middle band is ultimately an empirical matter, and no precedents existed to
look into.