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Frontiers in Educational Research, 2021, 4(9); doi: 10.25236/FER.2021.040910.

Constructing an ESP Bilingual Parallel Corpus Based on AntConc: Application and Assessment

Author(s)

Xi Lu1, Kai Jiang2

Corresponding Author:
Kai Jiang
Affiliation(s)

1Department of Common Required Courses, Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan, China

2College of Foreign Languages, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China

Abstract

AntConc is a free and green corpus tool developed by Japanese scholar Laurence Anthony featured by three main functions: concordance, wordlist and keywords. The author first describes the principles and process of constructing a web-based bilingual parallel corpus for the purpose of translation studies and ESP research based on AntConc. Constructing principles include strict linguistic standards, balance of corpus, and appropriate size. Based on the principles, language data is accumulated, processed and entered. After that, language processing software CLAWS part-of-speech tagger and Wmatrix are respectively used for text marking, annotating, high-frequency vocabulary extracting and corpus distribution balancing. In the end, texts, paragraphs and sentences are aligned by the corpus tool ParaConc. After the construction, the author uses the retrieval software Wordsmith 4.0 and statistical software SPSS 11.5 to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the corpus with a six-month experiment that covers 16 translators, 25 teachers and 285 students. 

Keywords

Computer Aided Translation, corpus, AntConc, Wmatrix, computational linguistics

Cite This Paper

Xi Lu, Kai Jiang. Constructing an ESP Bilingual Parallel Corpus Based on AntConc: Application and Assessment. Frontiers in Educational Research (2021) Vol. 4, Issue 9: 53-58. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2021.040910.

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