The parallel corpora perspective on studying contrastive punctuation

The paper presents the parallel corpora perspective on studying contrastive punctuation. Different languages often use the same punctuation signs in a quite different manner which challenges a translator. Differences in punctuation systems of various languages are studied in the field of contrastive punctuation, a rather underdeveloped branch of linguistics. The translator has to have an accurate understanding of these differences in order to see how particular and individualized the punctuation is in the source text so as to decide how to render it in the target language. To this end, the translator can take advantage of various information resources that result from the joint efforts of information science, computer linguistics, and corpus-based translation studies. One of such resources is supracorpora databases developed at the Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control” of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They store parallel texts (in different languages) from the Russian National Corpus and allow users to collect massive empirical data. The paper shows how this information resource can be used to research contrastive punctuation. Also, it draws some preliminary conclusions on functioning of several punctuation signs in French and Russian.