Cadlaws – An English–French Parallel Corpus of Legally Equivalent Documents

Abstract

This article presents Cadlaws, a new English–French corpus built from Canadian legal documents, and describes the corpus construction process and preliminary statistics obtained from it. The corpus contains over 16 million words in each language and includes unique features since it is composed of documents that are legally equivalent in both languages but not the result of a translation. The corpus is built upon enactments co-drafted by two jurists to ensure legal equality of each version and to re­flect the concepts, terms and institutions of two legal traditions. In this article the corpus definition as a parallel corpus instead of a comparable one is also discussed. Cadlaws has been pre-processed for machine translation and baseline Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (bleu), a score for comparing a candidate translation of text to a gold-standard translation of a neural machine translation system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest parallel corpus of texts which convey the same meaning in this language pair and is freely available for non-commercial use.