Constructing an ESP Bilingual Parallel Corpus Based on AntConc: Application and Assessment

AntConc is a free and green corpus tool developed by Japanese scholar Laurence Anthony featured by three main functions: concordance, wordlist and keywords. The author first describes the principles and process of constructing a web-based bilingual parallel corpus for the purpose of translation studies and ESP research based on AntConc. Constructing principles include strict linguistic standards, balance of corpus, and appropriate size. Based on the principles, language data is accumulated, processed and entered. After that, language processing software CLAWS part-of-speech tagger and Wmatrix are respectively used for text marking, annotating, high-frequency vocabulary extracting and corpus distribution balancing. In the end, texts, paragraphs and sentences are aligned by the corpus tool ParaConc. After the construction, the author uses the retrieval software Wordsmith 4.0 and statistical software SPSS 11.5 to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the corpus with a six-month experiment that covers 16 translators, 25 teachers and 285 students.