FTA Corpus: a 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 and a smaller subcorpus in English-Norwegian and Spanish-Norwegian that was prepared and then aligned with Translation Corpus Aligner 2 (Hofland & Johansson, 1998). The data was taken from Free Trade Agreements. These agreements are specialized texts officially signed and ratified by several countries and blocks of countries in the last twenty years. Thus, FTAs are a rich repository for terminology and phraseology that is used in different fields of business activity throughout the world. The corpus contains around 1.37 million words in the English section and 1.48 million words in its Spanish counterpart, plus 60,000 words each in the Spanish-Norwegian and English-Norwegian subcorpus. The corpus is being used primarily to study the terms and specialized collocations that include these terms in this kind of specialized texts.

Keywords: specialized collocation, specialized parallel corpus, corpus linguistics, Free Trade Agreement