From Business Corpus to Business Lexicon

Abstract

Language corpora are now indispensable to dictionary compilation. They help broaden the role of the dictionary from standardizing the vocabulary to recording a language. The trilingual corpus generated by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University gives a record of business languages used in Hong Kong. It differs from other corpora in that (1) it includes English, Chinese and Japanese; (2) it shows local characteristics; and (3) it focuses on a specific area (financial services, including banking, accounting, auditing, insurance and investment). The paper discusses various issues of setting up a tricorpus, and how to make full use of the data to generate a trilingual lexicon.

Keywords: multilingual, special purpose, corpus, lexicon