The right word in the right place : Key word associates in two languages

The problem of understanding collocation by reference to a narrow span of three or four words on either side of a word one is attempting to investigate, is that such a narrow contextual horizon does not provide enough information to characterise the word in question adequately. The paper therefore advocates use of a text horizon, in which words which have text relevance, i.e. key words, are first identified and then associated with other key words in the same text. By carrying out this procedure on thousands of texts, it becomes possible to identify key key words and their associates in the genre. In the study, such words were investigated in two languages, English and Brazilian Portuguese. The study revealed a considerable degree of potential for matching in the two languages between both key key words and associates in the genre Home News. These findings have implications for translation and language learning