A bilingual corpus of novels aligned at paragraph level

Abstract

The paper presents a bilingual English-Spanish parallel corpus aligned at the paragraph level. The corpus consists of twelve large novels found in Internet and converted into text format with manual correction of formatting problems and errors. We used a dictionary-based algorithm for automatic alignment of the corpus. Evaluation of the results of alignment is given. There are very few available resources as far as parallel fiction texts are concerned, while they are non-trivial case of alignment of a considerable size. Usually, approaches for automatic alignment that are based on linguistic data are applied for texts in the restricted areas, like laws, manuals, etc. It is not obvious that these methods are. applicable for fiction texts because these texts have much more cases of non-literal translation than the texts in the restricted areas. We show that the results of alignment for fiction texts using dictionary based method are good, namely, produce state of art precision value. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.