Russian Learner Parallel Corpus as a Tool for Translation Studies

The paper presents a project aimed at the development of a Russian Learner Parallel Corpus, discusses the existing analogues, describes the current status and the tasks in which it could be used. The existing parallel corpora contain (comparatively) “correct” translations; whereas the aim of the present project is to create a sufficiently large corpus of imperfectly translated Russian and English texts together with their sources and use it as a tool for translation studies, especially those related to translation mistakes. The new corpus will be a valuable resource for computational linguistics as it provides another way of getting data for evaluation which could be used to improve machine translation systems. As of now, the corpus is available online, it already contains nearly half a million word tokens and is growing. The main source of material is translations made by student translators in Russian universities.