The KAČENKA 2 project is a grant of the Ministry of Education for years 2002/2003, officially entitled "Electronic tools for combined and distant study of English".
The domestic name the project was given reveals that it is a follow-up to the 1997 KAČENKA grant project (the name being an acronym for Korpus anglicko-český, elektronický nástroj Katedry anglistiky, ie. The English-Czech Corpus, an Electronic Tool of the English Department). KAČENKA 1997 was aimed at creating a small parallel corpus which would enable linguists and translation theoreticians to work with entire texts (moreover computer-processable) in their analyses rather then with short extracts. The project team managed to compile a corpus of 3.3 million words (for details see the page of KAČENKA 1997).
After the project was ended, efforts were made to find further funding for a larger project called ČAPEK (Český a anglický paralelní elektronický korpus, i.e. Czech and English Parallel Electronic Corpus), in which this time several academic institutions should participate (apart from our English Department, four institutes of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague: Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Institute of English and American Studies, Institute of Translation Studies, Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics). However, the contest with with the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic was an unequal one and we were defeated three times (sic!).
Finally, however, a solo project of the FF MU English Department has succeeded at the Ministry of Education in 2002. The aims and goals of the KAČENKA 2 grant are wider and more varied:
1) The primary aim is to substantially enlarge the present KAČENKA corpus, while focusing especially on its synchronic character and representativeness. The future corpus should include not only the parallel part (consisting of both fiction and non-fiction / English-Czech and Czech-English texts and their translations), but also a comparable part (texts in Czech and English dealing with the same topic, but not translations) covering various areas such as constitutional law, computers and IT, etc.
2) The corpus data should be then used in courses offered by the English Department to their students of both daily and combined and/or distant studies. We plan to design several new courses in the track of Practical English (Collocations I will be taught already in autumn 2002), linguistics (Corpus Linguistics I and II), and Translation (literary translation, translation of non-fiction).
3) Part of the planned work is also the design of new tools and/or acquisition and adjustment of existing tools for handling the corpus and computer-assisted language learning software with view to the requirements of the various courses.
4) Co-operation with the Institute of the Czech National Corpus and Institute of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague was re-established and work divided (see the work schedule).
For further details, see the grant proposal.
Dana Šlancarová
project executive manager
