A specialized parallel corpus of English and Spanish Free Trade Agreements for the study of specialized collocations

Abstract

This paper describes the Corpus of Free Trade Agreements (henceforth FTA), a specialized parallel corpus in English and Spanish from Europe and America that is being prepared and aligned with Translation Corpus Aligner 2 (Hofland & Johansson, 1998). The data is taken from Free Trade Agreements officially signed and ratified by several countries and blocks of countries. Once complete, the corpus will contain about 1.3 million words in the English section and 1.5 million words in its Spanish counterpart. One of the aims is to study the specialized collocations that appear in this kind of texts and the terminological value of specialized collocations as carriers of specialized information.