We present an RST-based discourse annotation proposal used in the construction of a trial multilingual XML-tagged corpus of teaching material in Basque, English and Spanish. The corpus feeds an experimental multilingual document generation system for the web. The main contributions of this paper are an implementation of RST through XML metadata and the adoption of gross-grained RST to avoid non-isomorphism in multilingual corpora.

Parallel corpora enriched with descriptive annotations facilitate multilingual authoring development. Departing from an annotated bitext we show how SGML markup can be recycled to produce complementary language resources. On the one hand, several translation memory databases together with glossaries of proper nouns have been produced. On the other, DTDs for source and target documents have been derived and put into correspondence. This paper discusses how these resources have been automatically generated and applied to an interactive bilingual authoring system. This tool is capable of handling a substantial proportion of text both in the composition and translation of structured documents.