MSD-Manuals DE-ES. A corpus of specialised medical communication as part of the Parallel Corpus of German and Spanish (PaGeS)

Abstract

Abstract: This paper introduces the MSD Manuals DE-ES corpus, a bilingual German-Spanish supplement to the PaGeS corpus within the PaCorES project, focused on specialised medical communication. The corpus draws on both the professional and general-public versions of the Merck/MSD Manuals, renowned for their reliability and accessibility. Its primary aim is to document the compilation and alignment process of the corpus, which comprises over 500,000 bi-segments and 17.5 million words, distributed across two subcorpora (MSD Manual DE-ES home and MSD Manual DE-ES professional) that reflect distinct communicative registers: expert-to-layperson and expert-to-expert. The methodology combines tools from the MTUOC project with scripts developed using language models such as Copilot and LeChat, enabling the automation of complex tasks including text extraction, alignment, and metadata management. Technical challenges such as data cleaning and segmentation are addressed, and the potential of artificial intelligence in corpus linguistics is explored. The MSD-Manuals DE-ES corpus serves as a valuable resource for research in specialised translation, lexicography, and language teaching for specific purposes, while also helping to address the scarcity of parallel resources in the biomedical domain for the German-Spanish language pair. Its integration into PaGeS enhances the availability of freely accessible corpora for the research community.