How Comparable are Parallel Corpora? Measuring the Distribution of General Vocabulary and Connectives

In this paper, we question the homogeneity of a large parallel corpus by measuring the similarity between various sub-parts. We compare results obtained using a general measure of lexical similarity based on c2 and by counting the number of discourse connectives. We argue that discourse connectives provide a more sensitive measure, revealing differences that are not visible with the general measure. We also provide evidence for the existence of specific characteristics defining translated texts as opposed to nontranslated ones, due to a universal tendency for explicitation.