  Discourse markers are universal linguistic events subject to language
variation. Although an extensive literature has already reported language
specific traits of these events, little has been said on their cross-language
behavior and on building an inventory of multilingual lexica of discourse
markers. This work describes new methods and approaches for the description,
classification, and annotation of discourse markers in the specific domain of
the Europarl corpus. The study of discourse markers in the context of
translation is crucial due to the idiomatic nature of these structures.
Multilingual lexica together with the functional analysis of such structures
are useful tools for the hard task of translating discourse markers into
possible equivalents from one language to another. Using Daniel Marcu's
validated discourse markers for English, extracted from the Brown Corpus, our
purpose is to build multilingual lexica of discourse markers for other
languages, based on machine translation techniques. The major assumption in
this study is that the usage of a discourse marker is independent of the
language, i.e., the rhetorical function of a discourse marker in a sentence in
one language is equivalent to the rhetorical function of the same discourse
marker in another language.
