Designing a parallel corpus as multifunctional translator's aid

2006 saw the start of a project for compiling a multifunctional parallel corpus with Dutch as a pivotal language: the Dutch Parallel Corpus (DPC). Among other things, parallel corpora can be a useful tool in translation business. They can help to improve idiomatic language usage, provide translation suggestions or serve for filling up translation memory with high-quality data. The advantages of parallel corpora over multilingual comparable corpora or dictionaries/ glossaries is search speed and reliability. They contain a great amount of aligned data, examples from which can be viewed in the surrounding context. Besides, parallel corpora offer their user the benefit of metadata with additional information allowing for a finer-tuned search of the corpus. The corpus design and text typology are crucial for the usability of the corpus. Insights from cognitive linguistics on basic-level categories have proven to be useful for elaborating such a design and typology assuring (i) text type diversity containing translation samples from different areas of expertise; (ii) high translation quality providing reliable translation solutions; (iii) a well-structured taxonomy for prompt data retrieval.