Computational Communication Science| When the Journey Is as Important as the Goal: A Roadmap to Multilingual Dictionary Construction

Abstract

Communication scientists have made rapid advances in the computer-assisted analysis of large quantities of media data, but research has focused on monolingual corpora and most often on English-language text. This study works toward the application of computer-assisted analysis in the framework of multilingual media content. Taking the measurement of migration frames in the news coverage in 7 languages as a case study, it systematically compares different strategies (i.e., keyword preselection, translation, evaluation) for the construction of a multilingual dictionary. Classification results are contrasted to each other and to results of English monolingual dictionaries that are applied to the translated text corpus version. Even though we do not yet achieve perfect agreement between manual coding and dictionary classification decisions, with the strategies compared here, we outline methodological techniques that may bring researchers closer to this goal.