The Poitiers-Louvain Échange de Corpus Informatisés project is being undertaken in conjunction with the Université de Poitiers and aims to collect a large bidirectional English-French translation corpus. It includes literary prose and newspaper articles and is both paragraph- and sentence-aligned to allow the systematic study of translation processes and patterns. At its present state, PLECI contains c. 800,000 words of English texts translated into French and c. 1,300,000 words of French texts translated into English. The Centre is also gradually adding Dutch translations of English texts (current size: c. 200,000 words).
The PLECI corpus can function both as a translation (parallel) corpus and as a comparable corpus, as it allows for a 4-way comparison:
OF = Original French, SF = Source French, TF = Target French, OE = Original English, SE = Source English, TE = Target English
(1) OF vs OE, i.e. original English texts vs original French texts;
(2) SF vs TE / SE vs TF, i.e. original French texts vs translated version in English and original English texts vs translated version in French;
(3) OE vs TE / OF vs TF, i.e. comparisons of original and translated French and English;
(4) TE vs TF, i.e. comparisons of translated English and translated French.