Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

167In order to identify the content of the texts included in the Portuguese corpus, a listof all indexing terms was compiled. The indexing terms with the highest frequency scoreare contrato (Eng. contract), followed by direito (Eng. right) and dano (Eng. damage orharm). These terms may have the form of simple keywords (contrato) or the form ofcomplex keywords (contrato de arrendamento, contrato de compra e venda, etc.).Appendix 2 lists 44 indexing terms that appear at least 10 times in the identificationsections of the Portuguese corpus.4.1.3. The Canadian judgmentsThe English subcorpus consists of authentic and translated judgments written by the judgesof the Supreme Court of Canada. Judgments differ from cases in that the latter are abridgedversions of very elaborate and detailed judgments. All texts were downloaded from thefreely available online database of the Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada, whichis a collaborative effort of the Supreme Court of Canada and the LexUM laboratory in theFaculty of Law of the University of Montreal.The authentic texts were written by a judge representing a group of judges. Nonauthentictexts of the corpus correspond to French to English translations which werewritten by official translators. Contrary to what some authors state, namely Bowker andPearson (2002: 11), we believe that a comparable corpus may contain not only authentictexts but also translated texts as long as these are not the translations of the authentic textsincluded in the same corpus. In Canada, official translations used in courts have the samestatus as authentic texts (Lavoie 2005). For this reason, in this research, translatedjudgments are considered as legitimate as authentic texts for the inclusion in the corpus.