European Comparable and Parallel Corpora

ECPC

The European Parliamentary Comparable and Parallel Corpora (ECPC) is a research group with members based at different universities in Europe funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (HUM2005-03756/FILO).

The group is coordinated by Dr. Calzada Pérez (at Universitat Jaume I, Spain) and is comprised of some of the best well-known scholars in the field of Corpus-based Translation Studies (notably Prof. Mona Baker, Dr. Silvia Bernardini, Dr. Dorothy Kenny and Dr. Saturnino Luz, amongst others) from different European Universities: University of Manchester (UK), University of Birmingham (UK), Dublin City University (Ireland), Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Universitat Jaume I (Spain). These researchers are already well known in the implementation of technological tools and methodologies within Translation Studies. Most of them are also located within Translation Studies. Luz, however, is to be placed within the field of Computer Science. Currently the group is being assisted by a technical assistant: Fernando Gabarrón Barrios (Universitat Jaume I).

In short, ECPC is a multi-national, multidisciplinary group devoted to using technology to research into one of society’s potentially most cooperative activities, that of translating. ECPC will be analysing parliamentary speeches delivered at the plenary sessions of a variety of European Houses: the European Parliament (EP), the British Parliament (HC), the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados (CD) and the Irish Dáil Éireann (IDE).

Our intention is to:

align original and translate speeches in English and Spanish from the European Parliament (and study what is known within TS as “parallel corpora”).
study EP corpora and also speeches delivered at other above-mentioned parliaments in search of concordances and other similar kinds of data (and study what is known within TS as “comparable corpora”).
develop (aligning and concordancing) on-line tools to be used by the research community free of charge.