Abstract
The aim of this paper is to introduce a tool that has recently been developed at the Institute of the Czech National Corpus, the Treq (Translation Equivalents) database, and to explore its possible uses, especially in the field of lexicography. Equivalent candidates offered by Treq can also be considered as potential equivalents in a bilingual dictionary (we will focus on the Latvian-Czech combination in this paper).
Lexicographers instantly receive a list of candidates for target language counterparts and their frequencies (expressed both in absolute numbers and percentages) that suggest the probability that a given candidate is functionally equivalent. A significant advantage is the possibility to click on any one of these candidates and immediately verify their individual occurrences in a given context; and thus more easily distinguish the relevant translation candidates from the misleading ones.
This utility, which is based on data stored in the InterCorp parallel corpus, is continually being upgraded and enriched with new functions (the recent integration of multi-word units, adding English as the primary language of the dictionaries, an improved interface, etc.), and the accuracy of the results is growing as the volume of data keeps increasing.