Theme 14. Technologies in translation

The sources of reference available on the Internet are incredible. For example, if you go to www.google.com, one of the popular search engines it will give you access to more than 2 billion pages! Just image what that would be in terms of books.

While you will be asked to translate a range of subjects, and you have all this information at your fingertips, you must accept that you have limitations. But having have authoritative references available your work will be made a lot easier. Always ask if reference material is available when you accept a translation assignment. There may even be previous translations on the subject which provide a useful source of terms and vocabulary. There are times when there are no references available. There are also unhelpful clients who reply ‘You’re the translator – you should know!’ in response to a request for assistance. Fortunately, such clients are in the minority.

There is also a risk if you work as a freelance for a large company that the person commissioning the translation may not be aware of what is available within the company. This is particularly the case where the work is done under a time constraint. Ask if the company has a library and, if so, whether you may use it. Try and get the name of a contact who is able to explain any problem, technical or otherwise, in the source language. If you can offer an explanation to another contact in the target language, you can usually get the correct term.

An electronic dictionary is either a small handheld computer with integrated reference materials, or a PDA or a smartphone with a dictionary program. Electronic dictionaries are also programs that can be downloaded from the Internet or purchased on a CD-ROM or DVD and installed on a desktop computer or on a lap top, such as an Apple Macintosh or a Windows PC. Other electronic dictionaries can be searched and consulted online on the Internet. The computer-installed dictionaries can often be consulted directly from within any application that uses editable text. The term may be used in a broader sense to refer to the features of a machine-readable dictionary or spell checker.

A translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores segments that have been previously translated. A translation-memory system stores the words, phrases and paragraphs that have already been translated and aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”. Some software programs that use translation memories are known as translation memory managers (TMM).

Translation memories are typically used in conjunction with a dedicated computer assisted translation (CAT) tool, word processing program, terminology management systems, multilingual dictionary, or even raw machine translation output. A translation memory consists of text segments in a source language and their translations into one or more target languages. These segments can be blocks, paragraphs, sentences, or phrases. Individual words are handled by terminology bases and are not within the domain of TM.

Research indicates that many companies producing multilingual documentation are using translation memory systems. In a survey of language professionals in 2006, 82.5 % out of 874 replies confirmed the use of a TM. Usage of TM correlated with text type characterized by technical terms and simple sentence structure (technical, to a lesser degree marketing and financial), computing skills, and repetitiveness of content

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. At its basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another. Using corpus techniques, more complex translations may be attempted, allowing for better handling of differences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition, and translation of idioms, as well as the isolation of anomalies.

CAT (computer-aided translation) is also referred to as translation memory systems since all past translation saved in the computer’s memories can be re-used if exact or near-matches (known as fuzzy matches) can be retrieved. We’ll refer to them as CAT systems for brevity.

There are occasions when you might be asked to quote for translation work that is required in an unrealistically short space of time. The only feasible way of completing such work in a conventional way would be to use a team of translators working concurrently, and skilful project coordinators. The alternative is to develop CAT facilities where the computer produces a draft and then uses human post-translation editors to revise the work.

Development has been slow since the first serious attempts at machine translation were made 50 or more years ago (1948). These attempts were limited by contemporary hardware and other factors. The facility is becoming more of a viable option but still needs a skilled translator or language editor to make the result acceptable.

CAT software is essentially a set of tools used to manipulate a database of language information. It is the input of information in the form of translated words, phrases, sentences and even complete paragraphs in the source and target languages that constitutes this database.

CAT software is now available from a number of manufacturers of which the most-widely used is probably TRADOS. Such software is still reasonably expensive and requires a fairly powerful computer if it is to work satisfactorily. It is not something that you can use from day 1 since it needs a considerable amount of data input before it will start to produce anything like a usable translation. Try it when you first install it and you will get some hilarious results. However, the more information you can add the faster and better it works.

It is a misconception held by some unenlightened clients that all the translator needs to do is load the electronic file containing the source text into the computer and wait for the finished translation to be produced automatically. The following illustrates what happens in reality.

Basic sources: [11,12,13,14,16]

Supplementary sources: [21,23,24]

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