This study uses a large-scale English–Chinese parallel corpus to examine the senses of the prefix de- in English. Our investigation was designed in three main steps. The most commonly used de- verbs were first identified in the British National Corpus, their corresponding Chinese lexical items were manually collected from the English–Chinese parallel corpus, and using these Chinese items, we were able to identify the recurring Chinese characters and words that correspond to de- verbs in English, i.e. their translation candidates. The Chinese characters and words served as effective means to tease out five major sense groups entailed by the prefix de-. The results underscore the value of parallel corpora not only for sense disambiguation and translation candidate retrieval but also for contrasting typologically distant languages in terms of their morphological as well as alternative means for conveying meaning.