Russian language-specific words in the light of parallel corpora

The starting point for this chapter is the hypothesis that one may regard translation equivalents and paraphrases of a linguistic unit extracted from real translated texts as a source of information about its semantics (cf. the approach developed in Anderman and Rogers 2008). This may be especially useful for the so-called language-specific words since the great variety of possible translations is an indicator of the high language specificity of a word. The multiplicity of translations may be used as a quantitative measure of language specificity: the greater the number of different translations of a single lexical unit in existing translations,