The ACTRES parallel corpus: an English–Spanish translation corpus

Abstract

This paper describes the compilation of the ACTRES Parallel Corpus, an English–Spanish translation corpus built at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of León (Spain) by the ACTRES research group. The computerisation of the corpus was carried out in collaboration with Knut Hofland and Øystein Reigem, from the Department of Culture, Language and Information Technology, Aksis, at the UNIFOB/University of Bergen (Norway). The corpus is conceived as a powerful tool for cross-linguistic research in the fields of Contrastive Analysis and Descriptive Translation Studies. It was the need to bridge the gap between these disciplines and to extend applications that encouraged the building of a parallel corpus as a suitable tool to achieve these goals. This paper focusses on the practical aspects of building the corpus. A brief account of the research which prompted this endeavour precedes the description of this process. 4 4 This paper is an account of the building of the ACTRES Parallel Corpus, so no empirical results from research done on the basis of the corpus are reported here. Concerning new insights drawn from the actual use of P-ACTRES in English–Spanish translation and contrastive projects, there is an extended bibliography at: http://actres.unileon.es/

A corpus-based study of aspect: <em>still</em> and <em>already</em> + verb phrase constructions into Spanish¹

“…The version of P-ACTRES ES→EN used for this study dates from March 2013, and contains just under two and a half million words, distributed among books (fiction and non-fiction) press (newspapers and magazines) and miscellanea (table 1). The tagged parallel texts have been aligned at sentence level and can be searched with the Corpus Work Bench browser (CWB) (Izquierdo, Hofland and Reigem 2008). P-ACTRES 2.0 is used to obtain basic diagnostic information about language use and cross-linguistic interpretation.…”

From Babylon to Bergen: On the usefulness of aligned texts

“…As the alignment program has been described elsewhere, we will not go into detail as to how it works here. Instead we refer to Hofland (1996) and Hofland & Johansson (1998) for the original version of the TCA, and Izquierdo, Hofland and Reigem (2008) and Hareide & Hofland (2012) for its more recent, interactive version, TCA2, developed by Øystein Reigem.…”

On Describing Similarity and Measuring Equivalence in English-Spanish Translation

“…All the texts have been aligned at the sentence level using TCA2 (Izquierdo, Hofland and Reigem 2008). This version of the alignment program lets the researcher check whether its suggestions are correct so as to guarantee 100% accuracy.…”

“…As such, actual translations of English G-P Adjuncts into Spanish have been extracted from the so-called ACTRES Parallel corpus (Izquierdo, Hofland and Reigem 2008), which has been managed with the Corpus WorkBench system (CWB) and is accessed through a Web interface using the Corpus Query Processor (CQP).…”