Dataset origin: https://inventory.clarin.gr/corpus/809

Description

Since November 2007 the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation has made its multilingual Translation Memory for the Acquis Communautaire, DGT-TM, publicly accessible in order to foster the European Commission’s general effort to support multilingualism, language diversity and the re-use of Commission information. The Acquis Communautaire is the entire body of European legislation, comprising all the treaties, regulations and directives adopted by the European Union (EU). Since each new country joining the EU is required to accept the whole Acquis Communautaire, this body of legislation has been translated into 23 official languages. As a result, the Acquis now exists as parallel texts in the following 23 languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Greek, Finnish, French, Irish, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish. For Irish, there is very little data since the Acquis is not translated on a regular basis. Parallel texts are texts and their manually produced translations. They are also referred to as bi-texts. A translation memory is a collection of small text segments and their translations (referred to as translation units, TU). These TUs can be sentences or parts of sentences. Translation memories are used to support translators by ensuring that pieces of text that have already been translated do not need to be translated again. Both translation memories and parallel texts are important linguistic resources that can be used for a variety of purposes, including: - training automatic systems for statistical machine translation (SMT); - producing monolingual or multilingual lexical and semantic resources such as dictionaries and ontologies; - training and testing multilingual information extraction software; - checking translation consistency automatically; - testing and benchmarking alignment software (for sentences, words, etc.). The value of a parallel corpus grows with its size and with the number of languages for which translations exist. While parallel corpora for some languages are abundant, there are few or no parallel corpora for most language pairs. To our knowledge, the Acquis Communautaire is the biggest parallel corpus in existence, taking into consideration both its size and the number of languages covered. The most outstanding advantage of the Acquis Communautaire - apart from it being freely available - is the number of rare language pairs (e.g. Maltese-Estonian, Slovene-Finnish, etc.). The first version of DGT-TM was released in 2007 and included documents published up to the year 2006. In April 2012, DGT-TM-2011 was released, which contains data from 2007 until 2010. Since then, data is released annually (e.g. 2011 data is released in 2012 with the name of DGT-TM-2012). While the alignments between TUs and their translations were verified manually for DGT-TM-2007, the TUs in since DGT-TM-2011 were aligned automatically. The data format is the same for all releases. This page, which is meant for technical users, provides a description of this unique linguistic resource as well as instructions on where to download it and how to produce bilingual aligned corpora for any of the 253 language pairs or 506 language pair directions. Here is an example of one sentence translated into 22 languages (http://optima.jrc.it/Resources/Documents/0801_DGT-TM_Sample-translation-unit_all-languages.doc).

Citation

Joint Research Centre - European Commission (2016, January 01). DGT-TM-2016. [Dataset (Text corpus)]. CLARIN:EL. http://hdl.handle.net/11500/CLARIN-EL-0000-0000-68E9-5