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:

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.

OneTwoThree
One & twoThree

Filters

FilterDescription
text.idrefers to the ID of the text
text.datedate on which the speech was delivered at the EP
text.lengthlength of the speech in general (short, medium, long)
text.lengthwexact text length in words
text.durationduration of the speech (short, medium, long)
text.durationsduration of the speech in seconds
text.speedrefers to the pace of delivery of the speech (low, medium, fast)
text.speedwmspeed of delivery expressed in words per minute
text.deliveryread vs. impromptu
text.topicthe general topic of the seech
text.topicspectitle of the debate
text.typesource-spoken/ source-written/ target-interpreted/ target-translated
text.wordcountlength of the speech in words
speaker.namename of the speaker
speaker.gendergender of the speaker
speaker.countrycountry the speaker represents
speaker.nativethe speaker is speaking the native tongue or a foreign language
speaker.politfuncthe speaker’s political function at the EP
speaker.politgroupthe speaker’s political group
st.languagesource text language
st.lengthsource text length
st.lengthwsource text length in words
st.durationsource text duration in general (short, medium, long)
st.durationssource text duration in seconds
st.speedpace of the original speaker in general (low, medium, fast)
st.speedwmpace of the original speaker in words per minute
st.deliverymode of delivery of the source speech (read vs. impromptu)
interpreter.gendergender of the interpreter
interpreter.nativethe interpretation is delivered into the native tongue or the foreign language