[Corpora-List] Some comments on aligners

[Sampo Nevalainen]

Yet some more comments on aligners and parallel corpus tools...

I have used the IMS Corpus Workbench with single language corpora, and I
totally agree with Diana Santos that it is a great tool. Without doubt, as
most of the Unix and Linux tools, it beats 10-0 any Windows program in
efficiency and search capabilities. However, efficiency and suitability
(practicality) are obviously two different (although, of course, not always
mutually exclusive) things.

The IMS Workbench is clearly a better alternative if you do research on
large amounts of text and/or have a ready-made corpus to be used and/or
make some specialists build a corpus for your purposes. But if you want to
study single texts in a classroom, and probably "compile" small parallel
corpora of your own, then a simple Windows tool might do...  Just for
example, we might want to study our own short classroom or homework
translations (compare the alternative translations), or maybe search for
multilingual web pages on a special field (related to a certain
translation), download a couple of pages, align the texts and study them
with, say, ParaConc. Compiling this kind of "ad-hoc" parallel corpora with
the IMS Workbench would arguably appear too complicated for most of the
students and require much more time with all that indexing and stuff.

Finally, I do _not_ claim by any means that ParaConc would be the best (or
the only) choice for these kinds of tasks, but just one tool we happen to
have. I would be very glad if someone pointed me to another parallel
concordancer that would be relatively simple in use and not too picky with
texts to be used as a corpus.

yours,
sampo



( : ============================================= : )

Sampo Nevalainen, M.A.
Researcher
University of Joensuu
Savonlinna School of Translation Studies
P.O.Box 48
FIN-57101 Savonlinna
FINLAND

tel     +358-15-511 70      (operator)
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email   samponev at cc.joensuu.fi
http://www.joensuu.fi/slnkvl/