Peter Gilles / evelyn ZieGler The Historical Luxembourgish Bilingual Database of Public Notices 1 Abstract Bilingual parallel corpora are increasingly recognised as solid bases for contrastive lin- guistics, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The Historical Luxem- bourgish Bilingual Database of Public Notices is a diachronic single-genre corpus, com- prising French-German parallel texts from the years 1795 to 1920. This paper gives an overview of the text-corpus, specifying the features of the genre ‘public notices’, and explaining the criteria for text selection. Building on that, the paper details the compila- tion and presentation of text and image data stored in the corpus. Finally, we describe the technical tools for indexing, searching and managing the text and image data. 1. Introduction The Archive of the City of Luxembourg hosts a large number (around 7,000) of public notices, i.e. printed proclamations presented to the public, between the end of the 18 th and the beginning of the 20 th century. These large-scale printed public announcements served the city administration during that time as a central means of communicating laws, regulations and organizational matters concerning the public life of the city of Luxembourg. As most of the public notices are written in two languages (French and German) they form an ideal basis 2 for a large parallel corpus, defined as “a source text and its translation into one or more languages” (Aijmer 2008: 276). Parallel corpora guarantee comparability, but also allow the study of monolingual features and develop- ments. However, they are still a desideratum in historical linguistics, as Clar- idge (2008: 256) points out: “[F]rom a cultural-historical perspective, it would be interesting to link several European languages in a corpus of parallel texts or translations.” The corpus of the Historical Luxembourgish Bilingual Database of Public No- tices provides a resource for studies in both contrastive linguistics (e.g. simi- larities and differences concerning information structure phenomena, lexi- 1 This paper was made possible by a project funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche, Luxembourg. 2 We are very grateful to Dr. Evamarie Bange/Archive of the City of Luxembourg, for her per- mission to use the Affichen-Corpus.