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

Bitexts are generated by a piece of software called an alignment tool, or a bitext tool, which automatically aligns the original and translated versions of the same text. The tool generally matches these two texts sentence by sentence. A collection of bitexts is called a bitext database or a bilingual corpus, and can be consulted with a search tool.

History

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The idea of the bitext is attributed to Brian Harris, who first wrote a paper on the concept in 1988, and has been promoted by the Université de Montréal-based RALI (Recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique, or Applied Research in Computational Linguistics), a group of computer scientists and linguists who study natural language processing. Pierre Isabelle and Claude Bédard are noted promoters of the concept of the bitext.

Bitexts and Translation memories

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The concept of the bitext shows certain similarities with that of the translation memory. The main difference between a bitext and a translation memory is that a translation memory is a database in which its segments (matched sentences) are stored in a way that is totally unrelated to their original context; the original sentence order is lost. A bitext retains the original sentence order.

Bitexts are designed to be consulted by a human translator, not by a machine. As such, small alignment errors or minor discrepancies that would cause a translation memory to fail are of no importance.

Translation