BancTrad: a web interface for integrated access to parallel annotated corpora

The goal of BancTrad is to offer the possibility to access and search through (parallel) annotated corpora via the Internet. This paper presents the design of the whole process: from text compilation and processing to actually performing queries via the web, while it describes as well its technical architecture. The languages we work with are Catalan, Spanish, English, German and French. Queries are possible from any of these languages to Spanish and Catalan and vice versa (but not between the language pairs formed by French, German and English). The texts go first through a pre-processing and mark-up stage, then through linguistic analysis and are finally formatted, indexed and made ready to be consulted. The web interface has been created through the integration some ad hoc applications and some ready-to-use ones. It provides three different levels of query expertise: basic, intermediate and expert. The paper is structured as follows: section 1 gives an overview of the project; section 2 describes the text compilation process; section 3 explains the corpora building and parsing stages; section 4 details the search machine architecture; finally, section 5 describes foreseen applications of BancTrad. 1. Overview The original idea of BancTrad was to obtain a tool with pedagogic applications (see work done e.g. by Gaspari, Hansen, S.) especially thinking of translation and interpreting courses held at the Translation and Interpretation Faculty (FTI) of the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF). It was meant to be a translation databank that could serve both teachers and students to search for prototypical translations or texts containing special features that would make them interesting from the translator’s point of view. Afterwards, the target user of BancTrad was broadened to e.g. professional translators and linguists (see section 5), through the creation of different search modes and the expansion of the expressiveness of the queries, in order to adapt to the user needs or knowledge. As an annotated translation databank, BancTrad offers the possibility to work with Catalan, Spanish, English, German and French. Queries are possible from any of these languages to Spanish and Catalan and vice versa (but no queries are possible between the language pairs formed by French, German and English), as well as between Catalan and Spanish in both directions. The web page of the project can be accessed from http://glotis.upf.es/bt/index.html 2. Text collecting, extra-linguistic tagging and alignment The corpora in BancTrad aim at being representative for translated texts. In other words, they don't have a normative character but a descriptive one. Therefore we have chosen to collect documents from 1 This project is running under the auspices of the “Programa d’Innovació Docent” (Educational Innovation Program) sponsored by our university (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and has also been partially financed by the Spanish Government and by the 2001FI 00582 grant from the autonomous Government of Catalonia. very different sources, representing a variety of text types, subjects and registers. The main sources we have focussed on are faculty professors, work done in translation courses, publishing houses and the Internet. Many faculty professors work also as freelance translators, which constitutes a good source of high quality translations. Besides, the fact that we include (supervised) work done in translation courses can have many advantages regarding academic self-evaluation. Specially, because they give evidence of the text types, subjects, etc., which have been worked on with pedagogical purposes. As for translations from the Internet, some supervision is done on them before they are selected to be introduced in BancTrad (for the sake of quality). Selected texts are semi-automatically processed to be marked up with SGML tags and aligned with their respective original texts. Both the originals and the translations are marked up with some extra-linguistic information by means of a special MS Word form coded in Visual Basic (see Fig. 1). Figure 1: MS Word form used for the mark-up of extralinguistic features of the texts