Preparation

The need for parallel texts has been discussed in numerous articles in recent years. This paper focuses on how to set up a corpus of parallel texts, how to do research on such texts and how to export parallel texts to different file types. Parallel texts should be tagged in order to mark structural characteristics and other additional information.

Setting up parallel texts

The example below is taken from a joint research project between the German departments of the Universities of Würzburg (Germany) and Jyväskylä (Finland). The aim of the project was to describe and analyse problems of contrastive word formation and to explore possibilities of text analysis. For that purpose a corpus was set up consisting of complete and contemporary Finnish and German literary and documentary texts and their translations into the other language. The sheer number of 800,000 word forms makes it obvious that commercial word processing programs cannot handle such a large amount of text data. Therefore, we chose as a software tool the 'Tuebingen System of Text Processing Programs' (Tustep). One decisive factor in building a parallel corpus of two or more texts is - if you do not work with semantic features - that there must be the same number of structural tags in all basic files that relate to each other. For our purposes it was sufficient to restrict the alignment to paragraphs only. The following example demonstrates how a German text and its Finnish translation are aligned so that both can either be read on the PC-screen. The extract consists of three short paragraphs which are taken from the novel Der Tangospieler by Christoph Hein (1989):
“ 5.7 |"Was ist mit Ihrer Hand?" fragte der Beamte, der vor 5.8 |ihm saß und ihm zusah. 5.23 |Dann betrachtete er sein Werk, es 6.1 |sah aus wie die Unterschrift eines Achtjährigen. Er 6.2 |nickte zufrieden. 6.29 |Am Bahnhof ging er zum Schalter und verlangte eine 6.30 |Fahrkarte nach Leipzig. ” The Finnish version (Sästäjä) reads:
“ 5.7 |"Mikä kättä vaivaa?" kysyi virkailija, joka istui |vastapäätä 5.8 |häntä katsellen. 5.25 |Sitten hän tiiraili aikaansaannostaan. Se näytti 5.26 |kahdeksanvuotiaan nimikirjoitukselta. Hän nyökkäsi |tyytyväisenä. 6.24 |Asemalla hän meni luukulle ja pyysi lipun Leipzigiin. ” Both texts show their original structure as they were published. In order to do research easily on both texts at the same time it is necessary to combine them into one single file and to align all related units. The files are reformatted; the marked units are given a running number and merged into one. The newly created file can be edited by using the Tustep text editor:

Searching in parallel texts

The Tustep text editor provides all basic functions common to other word processing programs. In addition to that it can handle complex instructions for pattern matching. You can search for

several specific strings such as character strings or words or parts of words, at the same time excluding other character strings which you do not want to see (an instruction such as so,,,-pf-kl-st-fr--ist- shows only ( so) the clusters 'pf', 'kl', 'st', 'fr' with the exception of 'ist');
abstract strings such as capital or small letters, any standard or extended ASCII character, digits, identical characters, elements which depend upon characters on their left or right border; exclusions can also be made (the instruction so,,,/>*>*>=02>=01/ shows any combinations of two small letters (>*), followed by the second one (>=02) and then the first one again. Thus, patterns like 'assa', 'elle', and 'niin' are displayed);
any character in combination with a frequency declaration (><3 meaning 'minimum of 3', ><0 'may be missing', <>9 'maximum of 9', <>0 'any number of');
any combination of the three above. And there are many other possibilities.

If you want to find all German nouns in our text above, for example, which are movated by using the suffix '-in', you could use an instruction like so,,1-45,-<*<>0>*>1>2>|><0>3- which searches all lines of the current file from the first to the forty-fifth position, i.e. only in the German column, to determine whether there is a capital letter (<*), followed by any number of (<>0) small letters (>*), a member of character group >1, of string group >2, which has on its right side (>|) an optional (><0) member of character group >3. Before entering this search instruction the three groups just mentioned have to be defined. The group >1 contains all small letters with the exception of the vowels, which cannot occur before the suffix '-in', >2 holds the strings in and innen, and >3 contains all characters that could possibly follow the noun such as a blank or a punctuation mark (.,;:!?"). Detailed information on the syntax of instructions and other topics is given by Stahl (1996).

As a result, this so-instruction displays the first set of occurrences that fulfil the pattern matching requirements in Christoph Hein's novel. By changing so in the instruction above to sa (show around) the context of each pattern is displayed. The user is able to find these forms only by means of pattern matching and not with the help of semantic tags. He or she is completely independent and not restricted to any predefined information.

Exporting parallel texts

The next example is taken from the material of an international intensive course on "Multilingual text processing" which was given in Galway in 1997 with support from the EC Erasmus program. It is based upon Die Nachtwachen von Bonaventura by August Klingemann together with its translations into English by Gillespie (1972), into Italian by Collini (1990), and into Finnish by Kolehmainen, Oikarinen and Rahikainen (1997). Among other tasks, one aim of the course was to align the four texts horizontally sentence by sentence, and to export them to a PostScript file for printing and to a HTML file for web publishing. For economic and safety reasons the four text files are kept separate from each other. The beginning of the German original text file reads:
“[1-9] Erste Nachtwache
[2-9] Die Nachtstunde schlug; ich hüllte mich in meine abenteuerliche Vermummung, nahm die Pike und das Horn zur Hand, ging in die Finsterniß hinaus und rief die Stunde ab, nachdem ich mich durch ein Kreuz gegen die bösen Geister geschützt hatte. ” The three translations contain the same structure. The original and the translations are exported to PostScript by typesetting them with the Tustep-typesetting program (#Satz). Only a few of all typesetting possibilities are made use of when the four texts are processed to produce an output of aligned sentences. First, they are typeset in narrow columns one after the other to determine the linebreaks. Four new destination files are generated which show the final layout of all lines. The text blocks holding the grammatical sentences, however, are still of different length. These units of all text files are compared with each other to find out which is the longest among the four languages; if necessary empty space is inserted into the shorter ones. When the text is now typeset again with the inserted empty lines, all units are of equal length:

D. Lewis and P. Stahl describe the source code, which you can download from http://www.itug.de (> Programme > Nützliches), as well as possibilities of evaluating a literary translation.

Output to other formats

The same four basic text files that were used above can also be combined into one single HTML-file. To do this task you need about 40 lines of Tustep code:
1 |#CREATE,BV,CONFIRM=- 2 |#OPEN,READ=+,POSITIVE=|BV</.S0| 3 | 4 |#EXECUTE,*,PARAMETER=D;E;I;F,MARKER=! 5 |#COPY,SOURCE=BV!1.S0,DESTINATION=BV,MODE=-,ERASE=-,PARAMETER=* 6 |XX .[>/-.[0>=02!1-.[>/>/-.[>=02>=03!1-. 7 |*EOF* 8 |*EOF 9 | 10 |#PRESORT,BV,-STD-,MODE=-,ERASE=+,PARAMETER=* 11 |AA .[. 12 |AS1 .[. 13 |ES1 .-. 14 |AES 11 15 |A1 DEIF 16 |SSL 3 17 |*EOF 18 | 19 |#SORT,-STD-,-STD-,SORTFIELD=1+3,DELETE=1+3,ERASE=+ 20 | 21 |#CONVERT,SOURCE=*,DESTINATION=BV,MODE=0,ERASE=+ 22 |<HTML> 23 |<HEAD><TITLE>Bonaventura</TITLE></HEAD> 24 |<BODY><TABLE WIDTH="100%"> 25 |*EOF 26 | 27 |#COPY,-STD-,BV,+,-,* 28 |X .[<>0>/D.<<TR>>[>=02D. 29 |XX .[<>0>/</-<>0>/]. 30 |XX <<TD WIDTH="25%" VALIGN="TOP">>[>=02-<=02]. 31 |XX .#F+.<>.#F-.<>.#/+.<>.#/-.<>. 32 |XX .<Ä.Ä.<Ö.Ö.<Ü.Ü.\.. 33 |XX .>ä.ä.>ö.ö.>ü.ü.ß.ß. 34 |XX .&`/.&<=01grave;.&´/.&<=01acute;...` 35 |XXX -#.<<-"-#.>>-"-·-.-___- -[0-[- 36 |*EOF 37 | 38 |#CONVERT,*,BV,0,- 39 |</TABLE></BODY> 40 |</HTML> 41 |*EOF 42 | 43 |#CREATE,BV.HTM,SDF-AP 44 |#CONVERT,BV,BV.HTM,,+,CODE=ASCII This program file contains all necessary commands to achieve our goal. In the first line a temporary file is created and given the file name 'BV'. The four basic text files are opened for reading (l. 2) and copied to the new destination file 'BV' (l. 5-8), which is then sorted (l. 10-19). A HTML header is written to the file 'BV' (l. 21-25); the standard file containing the sorted units is added to the same destination file, and while the copying takes place, several source strings are exchanged for new destination strings to produce HTML tags and entities (l. 27-36). Finally, three closing tags are added (l. 38-41). A permanent non-Tustep file is created ('BV.HTM') which 'BV' is exported to (l. 43-44). A web browser displays the result:

All examples show that text files provide the basis for all other tasks. They can be aligned in such a way that a user is able to search the text for words and patterns he or she is interested in, or they can be exported to other coding schemes.

References

Veglie. Ed. P. Collini. Venezia: Marsilio, 1990.

The night watches of Bonaventura. Ed. G. Gillespie. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1972.

A. Klingemann. Nachtwachen von Bonaventura. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1991.

L. Kolehmainen L. Oikarinen M. Rahikainen. Ensimmäinen Yövartio. : , 1997.

D. Lewis P. Stahl. “Zugriff auf multilinguale Texte: Das Evaluieren einer literarischen Übersetzung unter Anwendung von Tustep.” Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte V. Beiträge zum Fünften Internationalen Symposion Würzburg 4. bis 6. März 1997. Ed. S. Moser P. Stahl W. Wegstein N. R. Wolf. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997.

P. Stahl. Tustep für Einsteiger. Eine Einführung in das "Tübinger System von Textverarbeitungs-Programmen". Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 1996.