ParaConc is a powerful bilingual or multilingual concordancer with an intuitive user interface. It is used in contrastive analyses, language learning, and translation studies/training. The screen shot to the right is the result of carrying out a search for "head"; then having the software guess at the translation; highlighting the translation and displaying it in a KWIC format. This is one way of examining translation of collocations and phrases in two languages. More representative uses involve the identification of "equivalent" constructions in two languages. The software is typically used with a pair of translations, but it is also possible to work with up to four different translations. In other words, you can have an original text and three translations or you can have an original text plus translations in three diferent languages. Most ParaConc buyers are teachers or researchers. Many corpus-based contrastive studies are carried out using ParaConc and universities with translation studies programs often use ParaConc in a computer lab setting.

The software is accompanied by a 110-page book ParaConc and Parallel Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies.

For the software to function, the translated texts must be aligned. It is possible to get aligned files of European Parliament proceedings etc., but if it is necessary to do the alignment there is an alignment utility or you can use stand-alone aligners such as WinAlign or Vanilla Aligner. To download a demo or get more information, go to the ParaConc site For questions about licences, send email to info@athel.com or barlow@athel.com. If you want an individual licence version of the software and do not need the CDROM and printed book, you can get it immediately from the Downloads folder for $89.