Language Services Industry

-------- 华豫江 John Hua

What is the language-services industry?

• The language industry is the sector of activity dedicated to designing, producing, and marketing tools, products, or services related to computerized language processing.

• It is a part of the information technology industry, but also draws upon the fields of linguistics, lexicography( 辞典编撰） , software engineering, artificial intelligence, and interface design （界面设计） .

The development of this industry

• Traditional (since mankind started developing trade millennia ago )

• Modern language industry (following availability of the internet)

• There are language industry companies of different sizes; none of them is dominant in the world market so far.

The scope of the industry

• Translation and Interpretation

• Editing, reviewing, proofreading (including CAR)

• CAT tools

• Terminology extraction

• Localization (language and software)

• Machine translation

1.Translation and Interpretation

• Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text .

• Language interpretation is the facilitating of oral or sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between users of different languages.

2.Editing, reviewing, proofreading (including CAR)

• Proofreading is the reading of a galley proof or computer monitor to detect and correct production-errors of text or art. Proofreaders are expected to be consistently accurate by default because they occupy the last stage of typographic production before publication.

• Computer-assisted reviewing (CAR) tools are pieces of software based on text-comparison and analysis algorithms. These tools focus on the differences between two documents, taking into account each document's typeface through an intelligent analysis.

3.CAT tools

• Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation, or CAT is a form of language translation in which a human translator uses computer software to support and facilitate the translation process.

4.Term extraction

• Terminology mining, term extraction, term recognition, or glossary extraction, is a subtask of information extraction. The goal of terminology extraction is to automatically extract relevant terms from a given corpus.

5.Localization (language and software)

• Language localization is the second phase of a larger process of product translation and cultural adaptation (for specific countries, regions or groups) to account for differences in distinct markets, a process known as internationalization and localization.

• In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market.

6. Machine translation

• Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.

Thank you!!