Parallel text

A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library are two examples of dual-language series of texts. Reference Bibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study; Origen's Hexapla (Gr. for "sixfold") placed six versions of the Old Testament side-by-side. Note also the most famous example, the Rosetta Stone.

Large collections of parallel texts are called parallel corpora (see text corpus). Alignments of parallel corpora at sentence level are prerequisite for many areas of linguistic research. During translation, sentences can be split, merged, deleted, inserted or reordered by the translator. This makes alignment a non-trivial task.

Bitext

In the field of translation studies a bitext is a merged document composed of both source- and target-language versions of a given text.

Bitexts are generated by a piece of software called an "alignment tool", or a "bitext tool", which automatically aligns the original and translated versions of the same text. The tool generally matches these two texts sentence by sentence. A collection of bitexts is called a "bitext database" or a "bilingual corpus", and can be consulted with a search tool.

History

The idea of the bitext is attributed to Brian HarrisFact|date=May 2008, who first wrote a paper on the concept in 1988, and has been promoted by the Université de Montréal-based RALI ("Recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique", or "Applied Research in Computational Linguistics"), a group of computer scientists and linguists who study natural language processing. Pierre Isabelle and Claude Bédard are noted promoters of the concept of the "bitext".

Bitexts and translation memories

The concept of the "bitext" shows certain similarities with that of the translation memory. Generally, the most salient difference between a bitext and a translation memory is that a translation memory is a database in which its segments (matched sentences) are stored in a way that is totally unrelated to their original context; the original sentence order is lost. A bitext retains the original sentence order. However, some implementations of translation memory, such as Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) (a standard XML format for exchanging translation memories between computer-assisted translation (CAT) programs, allow preserving the original order of sentences.

Bitexts are designed to be consulted by a human translator, not by a machine. As such, small alignment errors or minor discrepancies that would cause a translation memory to fail are of no importance.

See also

* Polyglot (book)
* Natural language processing
* Machine translation
* Computer-assisted reviewing
* Ruby character

External links

Parallel corpora

* [http://langtech.jrc.it/JRC-Acquis.html The JRC-Acquis Multilingual Parallel Corpus] of the total body of European Union (EU) law: "Acquis Communautaire" with 231 language pairs. [Cite conference
author = Ralf Steinberger Ralf, Bruno Pouliquen, Anna Widiger, Camelia Ignat, Tomaž Erjavec, Dan Tufiş, Dániel Varga
year = 2006
title = The JRC-Acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages
booktitle = Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2006). Genoa, Italy, 24-26 May 2006
conferenceurl = http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2006/]
* [http://urd.let.rug.nl/tiedeman/OPUS/ The Opus project aims at collecting freely available parallel corpora]
* [http://www.linguateca.pt/COMPARA/ COMPARA - Portuguese/English parallel corpora]
* [http://www.lilabar.com LILABAR - English/Russian parallel corpora]
* [http://www.inuktitutcomputing.ca/NunavutHansard/en/ Nunavut Hansard - English/Inuktitut parallel corpus]

Documentation

* [http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/~veronis/biblios/ptp.htm Parallel text processing bibliography by J. Veronis and M.-D. Mahimon]
* [http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rada/wpt/ Proceedings of the 2003 Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts]
* [http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rada/wpt05/ Proceedings of the 2005 Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts]

References