Building EPTIC: A many-sided, multi-purpose corpus of EU parliament proceedings

This chapter describes the steps involved in the construction of EPTIC, an intermodal corpus of European Parliament speeches. Despite its limited size, this corpus has features that justify its labour-intensive building process, in particular its multiple alignments. The text-to-text alignments allow users to compare interpretations and translations of source speeches and their written-up reports, while text-to-video alignments allow them to access the multimedia components from concordance lines. To illustrate the potential of EPTIC, a case study is presented of English loan words in original, translated and interpreted Italian and French. Results suggest that borrowing is more likely to occur in translated Italian than in any of the other corpus components.