With their huge speaking populations in the world, Spanish and Chinese occupy important positions in linguistic studies. Since the two languages come from different language systems, the translation between Spanish and Chinese is complicated. A comparative study for the language pair can discover the discourse differences between Spanish and Chinese, and can benefit the Spanish-Chinese translation. In this work, based on a Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus annotated with discourse information, we compare the annotation results between the language pair and analyze how discourse affects Spanish-Chinese translation. The research results in our study can help human translators who work with the language pair.

Discourse analysis is necessary for different tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP). As two of the most spoken languages in the world, discourse analysis between Spanish and Chinese is important for NLP research. This paper aims to present the first open Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus annotated with discourse information, whose theoretical framework is based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). We have evaluated and harmonized each annotation part to obtain a high annotated-quality corpus. The corpus is already available to the public.

Due to the huge population that speaks Spanish and Chinese, these languages occupy an important position in the language learning studies. Although there are some automatic translation systems that benefit the learning of both languages, there is enough space to create resources in order to help language learners. As a quick and effective resource that can give large amount language information, corpus-based learning is becoming more and more popular. In this paper we enrich a Spanish-Chinese parallel corpus automatically with part of-speech (POS) information and manually with discourse segmentation (following the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson, 1988)). Two search tools allow the Spanish-Chinese language learners to carry out different queries based on tokens and lemmas. The parallel corpus and the research tools are available to the academic community. We propose some examples to illustrate how learners can use the corpus to learn Spanish and Chinese.