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/