E.P.T.I.C.

The European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus (EPTIC) is developed at the University of Bologna and a few other universities responsible for different language components. At present EPTIC comprises texts in English, Italian and French, however, other language components, including Finnish, Polish and Slovene are currently on the way. The corpus is currently available at the NoSketch Engine platform (Rychlý 2007). EPTIC is an intermodal and a parallel corpus of a complex structure. Data included in the corpus is derived from the official website of the European Parliament, which provides, among other, videos and verbatim reports of the plenary sessions together with the interpretations of the speeches, as well as their translations (the latter only for plenaries taking place until mid-2011). Each language combination component in EPTIC includes the following aligned elements:

sources – spoken: orthographic transcript of the source speech for simultaneous interpretations, aligned with the video of the original speech (for now video alignment is only available for the Italian and English subcorpora)

sources – written: verbatim report of the source speech in the form available at the EP website, source texts of the translations

targets – interpreted: transcripts of interpretations available at the EP website only in audio format

targets – translated: translations of the verbatim reports available at the EP website

EPTIC includes language combinations of English and other official EU languages. The subcorpora completed so far include the following interpreting/ translation direction: English-Italian, Italian-English, English-French, French-English. The current sizes of individual subcorpora are visible in the Table 1 below. EPTIC is compiled mostly of short speeches ranging from 100 to 400 words, but there are also medium speeches ranging from 301 to 1000 words and long speeches exceeding that size. Speeches are delivered at the European Parliament plenary sessions on a range of topics (e.g. politics, agriculture) by different speakers, including mostly MEPs, but also commissioners and guests. While searching the corpus, it is possible to filter the queries using the contextual information that allow to narrow down the query to e.g. a speech delivered by a particular speaker, or a speech of particular length. The filtering options are described in Table 2.

As the corpus is aligned at sentence level, it is possible to search all 4 aligned components in a parallel search. In addition, the corresponding excerpt of a video of the source speech can be displayed.

One	Two	Three
One & two	Three

Filters

Filter	Description
text.id	refers to the ID of the text
text.date	date on which the speech was delivered at the EP
text.length	length of the speech in general (short, medium, long)
text.lengthw	exact text length in words
text.duration	duration of the speech (short, medium, long)
text.durations	duration of the speech in seconds
text.speed	refers to the pace of delivery of the speech (low, medium, fast)
text.speedwm	speed of delivery expressed in words per minute
text.delivery	read vs. impromptu
text.topic	the general topic of the seech
text.topicspec	title of the debate
text.type	source-spoken/ source-written/ target-interpreted/ target-translated
text.wordcount	length of the speech in words
speaker.name	name of the speaker
speaker.gender	gender of the speaker
speaker.country	country the speaker represents
speaker.native	the speaker is speaking the native tongue or a foreign language
speaker.politfunc	the speaker’s political function at the EP
speaker.politgroup	the speaker’s political group
st.language	source text language
st.length	source text length
st.lengthw	source text length in words
st.duration	source text duration in general (short, medium, long)
st.durations	source text duration in seconds
st.speed	pace of the original speaker in general (low, medium, fast)
st.speedwm	pace of the original speaker in words per minute
st.delivery	mode of delivery of the source speech (read vs. impromptu)
interpreter.gender	gender of the interpreter
interpreter.native	the interpretation is delivered into the native tongue or the foreign language