Publication details
InterCorp & co. – Co se všechno (ne)stihlo
| Title in English | InterCorp & co. – What has (not) been done |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Chapter in a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Attached files | |
| Description | This article reflects on the emergence, development, and current state of parallel corpora in the Czech context, with a particular focus on the InterCorp project and its predecessors (Kačenka and the Czech–German parallel corpus). Drawing on both personal experience and a historical-methodological perspective, the author traces the evolution of parallel corpus building from the late 1990s to the present and discusses its technical, organizational, and epistemological limitations. Special attention is paid to the role of parallel corpora in contrastive linguistics and to their largely underdeveloped use in the education of future foreign-language teachers in the Czech Republic. Based on an analysis of university curricula and a small-scale survey, the article demonstrates that the systematic integration of corpus-based methods into teacher education remains rather exceptional. The critical part of the paper highlights issues such as data obsolescence, limited representativeness, and the user-unfriendly nature of some corpus interfaces, especially in relation to the needs of language teaching. In conclusion, corpora are presented as tools for democratic, empirically grounded reflection on language, which should complement traditional reference works as well as contemporary AI-based language technologies. |