Parallel and comparable corpora for terminology analysis in the domain of migration

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the bilingual (English – Lithuanian) corpora compiled for research on specialised language in the domain of migration. The topic of migration is found to be one of the most significant themes for discussion recently. In 2021-2022, migration through the EU eastern borders increased considerably and obtained new dimensions as it was used for organizing hybrid attacks against EU states. Terminology of migration is of immense importance both for migrating people and politicians, officials and border officers dealing with the migration crisis. Corpus linguistics methods can enable analysing various aspects of migration terms and thus contribute to terminology management of this domain. Two types of bilingual corpora were compiled for the research: parallel and comparable. The parallel corpus was composed of international legal acts on migration issues: their original version in English and translations into Lithuanian. The parallel corpus includes the EU legal acts and other documents as well as legal acts of international organisations – the United Nations and the Council of Europe. Meanwhile, the comparable corpus was composed of Lithuanian and UK national legal acts and other documents from the migration domain written in the original English and Lithuanian languages. The compiled corpora allow to analyse migration terms in international and national settings: to model and compare the terminological-concept structures of the domain as well as to study formation and usage patterns of the terms in international and national documents.