Creating a Parallel Corpus from the "Book of 2000 Tongues"

This paper reports on a project to annotate biblical texts in order to create an aligned multilingual Bible corpus for linguistic research, particularly computational linguistics, including automatically creating and evaluating translation lexicons and semantically tagged texts. The output of this project will enable researchers to take advantage of parallel translations across a wider number of languages than previously available, providing, with relatively little effort, a corpus that contains careful translations and reliable alignment at the near-sentence level. We discuss the nature of the text, our annotation process, and intended uses for the corpus, and we point out relevant aspects and potential limitations of the current draft of the Corpus Encoding Standard with respect to this corpus. 2 Why this text? 2.1 The nature of the text The Bible is a widely available, representative sample of carefully translated texts in a variety of styles in a wide range of languages. These pr..