Creating parallel and comparable corpora for work in domain specific areas of language

Parallel corpora - alignment & annotation problems

• Different linguistic theories = different annotation schemes
• E.g. Morphological, syntactic or semantic?
• Different languages = different annotation schemes
• E.g. English / Portuguese / Polish / Finnish /Chinese
• Different languages = different types of alignment
• E.g. English / Hebrew / Chinese

Parallel corpora - professional uses

• Translation memories – aligned collections of repetitive texts in special domains
• Provide previous translations for translator to consult / copy
• Allow economy in translation process
• Provide material for probabilistic machine translation
• E.g. EU translation services, Canadian Hansard

Translation memories – requirements

• “Garbage in = garbage out!”
• Original > good quality – hence
• Emphasis on: good editing and proof reading > controlled language
• E.g. EU documentation – training people to edit English documents written by non-native speakers
• Translation > good quality – but certain parallel relationship to the original
• Therefore: tendency to homogeneity
• (e.g. Eurospeak)

Parallel corpora - academic uses

• For studying the translation process
• For studying translation solutions
• E.g.
• INTERSECT – French/English (Brighton)
• English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus Project (Oslo)
• COMPARA/DISPARA – Portuguese/English – online at http://www.portugues.mct.pt/
• For terminology extraction

Parallel corpora - requirements

• Theory should allow for any original + translation - warts and all!
• Much literary criticism of translation thrives on the ‘warts’!
• Useful for study of errors, translationese etc
• Practical applications require quality:
• Contrastive linguistics
• Pedagogical applications
• Terminology extraction