Project description: A multilingual corpus of tourism contracts (German, Spanish, English, Italian) for automatic text generation and legal translation

---

In line with recent developments in corpus-based EBMT,TM and other electronic 
tools (the translator’s workbench), the TURICOR project sets out to 
explore the possibilities of corpus linguistics for automatic text generation 
and specialised translation. Our main goal is to develop a prototype 
multilingual Natural Language Generation (NLG) system for producing legal 
documents (tourism contracts) in each of the four target languages in parallel. 
The starting point will not be a source text in one language, but an 
interlanguage account of the contents to be expressed. With this aim in mind, a 
multilingual corpus (both parallel and comparable) will be compiled from 
tourism and law websites in the Internet. A protocol will be laid out for 
searching the WWW, and retrieving, encoding and storing (hiper)texts. The data 
extracted from the corpus will provide researchers with a rich gamut of 
information about tourism advertising strategies, restricted languages, 
terminology, specialised lexicography, comparative law, translationese, 
contrastive rhetoric and linguistics. TURICOR will also prove an invaluable 
tool for translators’ training and the teaching of languages for special 
purposes. In addition, the (e-commerce) tourism industry will greatly benefit 
from both the NLG system and the series of knowledge and lexical databases to 
be implemented within the project.(Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology, 
ref no. BFF2003-04616,project leader: Gloria Corpas Pastor)