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Aparallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations.[1][2]Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. TheLoeb Classical Library and theClay Sanskrit Library are two examples of dual-language series of texts. ReferenceBibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study;Origen'sHexapla (Greek for "sixfold") placed six versions of the Old Testament side by side. A famous example is theRosetta Stone, whose discovery allowed theAncient Egyptian language to begin beingdeciphered.
Large collections of parallel texts are calledparallel corpora (seetext corpus). Alignments of parallel corpora at sentence level are prerequisite for many areas oflinguistic research. During translation, sentences can be split, merged, deleted, inserted or reordered by the translator. This makes alignment a non-trivial task.
Parallel texts may be used inlanguage education.[3]
Parallel corpora can be classified into four main categories:[citation needed]
Large corpora used as training sets formachine translation algorithms are usually extracted from large bodies of similar sources, such as databases of news articles written in the first and second languages describing similar events.
However, extracted fragments may be noisy, with extra elements inserted in each corpus. Extraction techniques can differentiate betweenbilingual elements represented in both corpora andmonolingual elements represented in only one corpus in order to extract cleaner parallel fragments of bilingual elements. Comparable corpora are used to directly obtain knowledge for translation purposes. High-quality parallel data is difficult to obtain, however, especially for under-resourced languages.[4]
In the field oftranslation studies abitext is a merged document composed of both source- and target-language versions of a given text.
Bitexts are generated by a piece of software called analignment tool, or abitext tool, which automatically aligns the original and translated versions of the same text. The tool generally matches these two texts sentence by sentence. A collection of bitexts is called abitext database or abilingual corpus, and can be consulted with a search tool.
Bitexts have some similarities with translation memories. The most salient difference is that a translation memory loses the original context, while a bitext retains the original sentence order. That said, some implementations of translation memory, such asTranslation Memory eXchange (TMX), a standardXML format for exchanging translation memories betweencomputer-assisted translation (CAT) programs, allow preserving the original order of sentences.
Bitexts are designed to be consulted by a humantranslator, not by a machine. As such, small alignment errors or minor discrepancies that would cause a translation memory to fail are of no importance.
In his original 1988 article, Harris also posited that bitext represents how translators hold their source and target texts together in their mental working memories as they progress. However, this hypothesis has not been followed up.[5]
Online bitexts and translation memories may also be calledonline bilingual concordances. Several are available on the public Web, includingLinguée,Reverso, and Tradooit.[6][7][8]