Researcher of the Month: Mihail Kopotev

Mihail Kopotev

photo: Mihail Kopotev

The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources.

Who are you?

I am Mihail Kopotev, and I work as a lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Helsinki.

How are you utilizing the Language Bank in teaching?

I use the Finnish-Russian Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts in my Finnish–Russian translation practices class. The participants have the possibility to do both practical translation exercises and their own research. Feedback from students has been very positive. Most of them have not heard about the corpus before but intend to use it in their future work.

Parallel corpora are useful to translators and teachers in many ways. Their main advantage is that they enable searching for words’ and word combinations’ counterparts in authentic translation corpora. Other types of corpora or dictionaries cannot offer such an impressive and rich environment that can be used both in comparison and making individual translation decisions.

The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.

All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive.