... and never the twain shall meet?

Parallel and comparable corpora are playing an increasingly important role in linguistics and computational linguistics. This introduction aims at providing an overview of the state of the art of parallel and comparable corpus research, paying particular attention to the situation in Scandinavia. The existence of two distinct and partly separate research traditions in parallel corpus linguistics is noted and discussed, as are the issues of parallel corpus terminology, the creation of parallel and comparable corpora, and the uses and potential uses of parallel and comparable corpora in linguistics and computational linguistics. Finally, we look at the development of tools for the creation and processing of such corpora.