Describing lexical patterns in simultaneously interpreted discourse in a parallel aligned corpus of Russian-English interpreting (SIREN)

The paper introduces a corpus of simultaneous interpretation, SIREN. SIREN is a parallel aligned bidirectional corpus of original and simultaneously interpreted speech in Russian and English. At the moment the corpus contains 235,040 words and is enriched with POS and shallow syntactic annotation. After a report on corpus design, I use scores such as lexical variety, density and POS proportionalities to make tentative claims about the linguistic variation between originals and interpretations. Low lexical variety and density are taken as indicators of simplification, while higher ratio of nominal to pronominal reference is seen as an indicator of explicitation. Atypical wordclass distribution indicates shining through of the source language. Somewhat contradictory results, with Russian subcorpus conforming to the predictions of translation theory and English subcorpus exhibiting an opposite trend in all universals but shining through, invites further investigation of the data and once again puts into question unequivocal claims about T-universals.