Parallel text

A famous example is the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery allowed the Ancient Egyptian language to begin being deciphered.

[3] Parallel corpora can be classified into four main categories:[citation needed] Large corpora used as training sets for machine translation algorithms are usually extracted from large bodies of similar sources, such as databases of news articles written in the first and second languages describing similar events.

[4] In the field of translation studies a bitext is a merged document composed of both source- and target-language versions of a given text.

As such, small alignment errors or minor discrepancies that would cause a translation memory to fail are of no importance.

In his original 1988 article, Harris also posited that bitext represents how translators hold their source and target texts together in their mental working memories as they progress.

The Rosetta Stone , a stele engraved with the same decree in both of the Ancient Egyptian scripts as well as Ancient Greek . Its discovery was key to deciphering the Ancient Egyptian language.