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In:Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies: New resources and applications
Edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 90] 2019
► pp. 123–139

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Building EPTIC

A many-sided, multi-purpose corpus of EU parliament proceedings

 | University of Bologna
 | University of Bologna
Published online: 20 March 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.90.08fer
This chapter describes the steps involved in the construction of EPTIC, an intermodal corpus of European Parliament speeches. Despite its limited size, this corpus has features that justify its labour-intensive building process, in particular its multiple alignments. The text-to-text alignments allow users to compare interpretations and translations of source speeches and their written-up reports, while text-to-video alignments allow them to access the multimedia components from concordance lines. To illustrate the potential of EPTIC, a case study is presented of English loan words in original, translated and interpreted Italian and French. Results suggest that borrowing is more likely to occur in translated Italian than in any of the other corpus components.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Why another corpus of European Parliament speeches?
  • 2.What EPTIC looks like
    • 2.1One corpus, fourteen subcorpora
    • 2.2Practical details: Size and availability
  • 3.Building EPTIC
    • 3.1Selecting and obtaining raw corpus materials
    • 3.2Transcribing the oral data
    • 3.3Adding metadata
    • 3.4Performing text-to-text alignment
    • 3.5Performing text-to-video alignment
    • 3.6POS-tagging, lemmatization and indexing
  • 4.An example: English loan words in Italian and French
  • 5.Conclusion: Teaming up
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
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