‘Irrefragable answers’ using comparable corpora to retrieve translation equivalents Serge Sharoff · Bogdan Babych · Anthony Hartley Published online: 12 December 2007 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract In this paper we present a tool that uses comparable corpora to find appropriate translation equivalents for expressions that are considered by translators as difficult. For a phrase in the source language the tool identifies a range of possible expressions used in similar contexts in target language corpora and presents them to the translator as a list of suggestions. In the paper we discuss the method and present results of human evaluation of the performance of the tool, which highlight its usefulness when dictionary solutions are lacking. Keywords Large comparable corpora · Translation equivalents · Multiword expressions · Distributional similarity 1 Introduction There is no doubt that both professional and trainee translators need access to authentic data provided by corpora. With respect to polysemous lexical items, bilingual dictionaries list several translation equivalents for a headword, but words taken in their contexts can be translated in many more ways than indicated in dictionaries. For instance, the Oxford Russian Dictionary (ORD) lacks a translation for the Russian expression исчерпьІВаюЩий ОТВеТ (‘exhaustive answer’), while the Multitran Russian–English dictionary suggests that it can be translated as irrefragable answer. Yet this expression is extremely rare in English; on the Internet it occurs mostly in pages produced by Russian speakers. On the other hand, translations for polysemous words are too numerous to be listed for all possible contexts. For example, the entry for strong in ORD already has 57 subentries and yet it fails to mention many word combinations frequent in the British S. Sharoff (&) · B. Babych · A. Hartley Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK e-mail: S.Sharoff@leeds.ac.uk 123 Lang Resources & Evaluation (2009) 43:15–25 DOI 10.1007/s10579-007-9046-4