Create and search a text corpus | Sketch Engine (original) (raw)

If you have a professional interest in words and meaning – as a teacher, a student, a language engineer, or a linguistic theorist – you need Sketch Engine. This is because words in isolation are hopelessly ambiguous. Only in context do words have a clear meaning. The genius of Sketch Engine is that it shows how prototypical collocations affect meaning. For example, “blowing up a bridge” has a quite different meaning from “blowing up a balloon”.

Even more different are “blowing your nose” and “blowing a whistle”. Similar examples could be cited in many other languages. In my work on verb patterns and lexical semantics, meanings are arranged in patterns around prototypical collocations. I could not do this work without Sketch Engine.

Why should translators bother with corpora, when there are so many other resources and technologies available? Well, corpora can help us address questions that are not covered in dictionaries, termbases, translation memories, the Wikipedia, Google, Linguee, translators’ forums, and so on. The beauty of Sketch Engine is that with one single tool you can look up answers to all sorts of questions in many different languages. In the same way as CAT tools are like an enhanced text editor that has been adapted to the needs of translators, think of Sketch Engine as a kind of tweaked search engine that has been customized for linguistic analysis, helping you get unprecedented access to how language is really used.

When I speak to other people about Sketch Engine, they are impressed by how easy Sketch Engine is to use. Much easier than they had feared. One presentation, a demo and a supervised exercise is all I have ever done and yet the participants rarely needed my support after the session.

Sketch Engine has established itself, deservedly, as the industry-standard corpus-querying package for dictionary-making. I have been using it – as a lexicographer, corpus linguist, and language learner – ever since its launch in 2004. What is so impressive about Sketch Engine is the way it has developed and expanded from day one – and it goes on improving.