The North-West University Bible corpus: A multilingual parallel corpus for South African languages

Abstract

This article reports on a project on the development of language resources and linguistic tools for Afrikaans. In the first part of the article, the multilingual parallel corpus that was created in the project is described. The corpus consists of aligned translations of the Bible in three languages, English, Dutch and Afrikaans. The second part of the article discusses one of the applications of a multilingual parallel corpus: induction of linguistic tools for a resource-scarce language.

Keywords:

• computational linguistics
• corpus annotation
• corpus linguistics
• parallel corpora
• resource-scarce languages
• unsupervised methods