ParaConc

ParaConc is a bilingual/multilingual concordance program (in different formats) designed to be used for contrastive corpus-based language research and for training and analysis related to translation studies.

ParaConc (for Windows)

A commercial Windows version will be available from Athelstan later in the year. The educational price for a single user will be under $150. (See the Athelstan website for a pre-release price.) There are two beta versions freely available. Update: Much of the functionality of version 1.0 is now in place and the current tasks are mostly interface and bug related. However, the alignment routines still have to be added. I hope that the program will be available March 1.

Original beta

The orginal (1995) beta version is available. A basic manual may be useful. If you don't want to look at the manual, then I suggest that in addition to looking at the menu commands, you also try a double click left mouse button and a single click right mouse button in each of the results windows.

New beta

The new version is being built using much of the basic code from MonoConc Pro 2.0. To run this version, you need to download the Conc.exe file and create a sister folder called AlignImport, which contains the two DLLs included in this zip file.

There is currently no alignment utility; the files must be pre-aligned..

The Max Candidates percentage in Hot Words Options should be set (as a default) to 100%.

There is no manual/help available at present. You can look at a fragment of the manual.

The search and sort options should work for either language. If some words are highlighted in the L2 window (following use of "Hotwords"), then those words can be used as the basis for sorting. In other words, some of the menu actions are tied to the selected window. Since a line may be highlighted in two windows, it may not be easy to tell by looking which window is active. You can click on a line in a window to make sure you know which window you are working in.

These are some hints about the capabilities of the program.

ParaConc (HyperTalk)

The original parallel concordancer (programmed in HyperTalk) runs on a Mac and can be downloaded from here. Please send an email message (barlow@ruf.rice.edu) when you do this. The program is for individual, research use only and cannot be loaded onto a network without purchasing a site licence agreement.

Clicking on the following link will send a binhexed version of ParaConc to your Mac, assuming that your web-browser is configured appropriately.

Some sample aligned text files can also be downloaded via ftp:
English
Spanish

For more info, look at the manual.

Bibliography

Barlow, M. 1995. A Guide to ParaConc. Houston: Athelstan

Barlow, M. 1995. ParaConc: A concordancer for parallel texts Computers and Texts 10. (CTI Textual Studies)

Barlow, M. 1996. Analysing parallel texts with ParaConc. ALLC/ACH '96. University of Bergen, Norway.

Barlow, M. 1996. Parallel texts in language teaching. In Botley, S.P., J. Glass, T. McEnery, A. Wilson (eds): Proceedings of Teaching and Language Corpora 1996. UCREL Technical Papers 9 (Special Issue), Lancaster University.

Barlow, M. Forthcoming. Parallel texts in linguistic analysis. In M. Barlow and S. Kemmer (eds.) Usage-based models of language.

Dickens, A. and R. Salkie. To appear. Comparing bilingual dictionaries with a parallel corpus. Proceedings of Eurolex International Conference on Lexicography. Gothenburg, Sweden.

Salkie, R. 1995. INTERSECT: a parallel corpus project at Brighton University. Computers & Texts 9.