Optimising the Europarl corpus for translation studies with the EuroparlExtract toolkit

摘要

The freely available European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus, or Europarl, is one of the largest multilingual corpora available to date. Surprisingly, bibliometric analyses show that it has hardly been used in translation studies. Its low impact in translation studies may partly be attributed to the fact that the Europarl corpus is distributed in a format that largely disregards the needs of translation research. In order to make the wealth of linguistic data from Europarl easily and readily available to the translation studies community, the toolkit EuroparlExtract' has been developed. With the toolkit, comparable and parallel corpora tailored to the requirements of translation research can be extracted from Europarl on demand. Both the toolkit and the extracted corpora are distributed under open licenses. The free availability is to avoid the duplication of effort in corpus-based translation studies and to ensure the sustainability of data reuse. Thus, EuroparlExtract is a contribution to satisfy the growing demand for translation-oriented corpora.