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The good old British National Corpus

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One of the most useful Internet tools for translators translating into English, and indeed any English writers, is the (link is no longer accessible) British National Corpus. The corpus is a collection of modern British English, containing over a million words. It consists of 90% written texts and 10% spoken texts.

Anyway, to give you a real example of how I used it, I was just revising a sentence in which I said “on the contrary”, and I was unsure what the best punctuation was to go after it: a colon, a comma or a full stop. I searched in the corpus, and as you will see if you click on the above link and do the same search, by far the most used punctuation mark after “on the contrary” is the comma.

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5 thoughts on “The good old British National Corpus

  1. Hey Tim, glad to see you have joined the world of the blog! But what is this putting it on the world wide web about me sleeping through the storm! Bless ya mate

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