The European Commission (EC) has a large budget for research. Most of this
is spent on competitive grants to laboratories and universities.
The Commission also has its own in-house research facility - the "Joint
Research Centre". The EC Joint Research Centre and the EC Directorate
General for Translation have recently put their "Translation Memory for the
Acquis Communautaire" into the public domain [1].
This will be a useful resource for all types of cross-lingual research. It
comprises parallel texts in 22 European languages - 231 language pair
combinations, more than 1 billion words total - and it comes together with
supporting software. The conditions for use are generous.
So the European Commission is now a de-facto contributing member of the Open
Data Movement [2].
N Miradon
[1]
http://langtech.jrc.it/DGT-TM.html
[2]
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2008/01/open-access-interviews-peter-murray.html
Received on Wed Jan 23 2008 - 11:29:28 GMT