Technology era in literary translation

7/29/2019 Technology era in literary translation

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There is a wide range of information and communications technologies (ICT) available

to translators today, including both general tools and specific tools. For the effects of

this investigation ICT is defined as a group of information and communication

technological applications, both general and specific, traditional or advanced that are

especially useful for the professional translator. Among the general applications or

tools, we have the Internet, the use of corpus linguistics and concordance generator

programs as the most important ones. Among the specific ICT for the translator we

have automatic translation (AT), and computer assisted translation (CAT) including

translation memories.

General ICTs for translators.

The Internet

The services offered by the Internet provide the professional translator with

considerable advantages in the documentation task as it allows him/her to access to a

huge quantity of data and publications, as well as to communicate with experts and

translators in other parts of the world with the purpose of exchanging ideas and

experiences. In our opinion one of the most important tools offered by the Internet are

the search and location information engines. At the current time, the three leading

search engines are Google; Yahoo!, and

Microsoft's Bing (formerly Live Search).

They allow to access in a few seconds to an enormous quantity of

interrelated information. Further, the usefulness of these tools in our work as medical

translator will be explained.

Language Search Engine Software

New to the translation industry, Language Search Engine software is typically an Internet based

system that works similarly to Internet search engines. Rather than searching the Internet, however, a

language search engine searches a large repository of Translation Memories to find previously

translated sentence fragments, phrases, whole sentences, even complete paragraphs that match source

document segments. It leverages more from translation memories than traditional translation memory

software.


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Language search engines are designed to leverage modern search technology to conduct searches

based on the source words in context to ensure that the search results match the meaning of the source

segments. Like traditional TM tools, the value of a language search engine rests heavily on the

Translation Memory repository it searches against.

The use of corpus linguistics

This is another tool that can be of great help for the professional translator. Corpora are

classified in two types. On one hand, the monolingual corpora, for example CREA(Corpus de

Referencia del Espaol Actual) of the Royal Spanish Academy. On the

other hand, we have the bilingual corpora that can, in turn, be divided in parallel corpus

and comparable corpus. The former is made up of a group of source texts and their

respective translations. The best example of this is the Canadian Hansards. The latter

are texts originally written in two or more languages.

Specific ICTs for translators.

Machine translation (MT)

Machine Translation is a procedure whereby a computer program analyzes a source

text and produces a target text without further human intervention. In reality, however,

machine translation typically does involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing

and post-editing.

Computer-assisted translation (CAT)

Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation, or CAT is a form of translation wherein a

human translator translates texts using computer software designed to support and facilitate the

translation process.

Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided, translation.

Some advanced computer-assisted translation solutions include controlled machine translation (MT).

Integration of MT into computer-assisted translation has been implemented in various ways by various

parties. Although this type of technology is neither widely known nor available to individual

translators, carefully-customized user dictionaries based on correct terminology significantly improve

the accuracy of MT, and as a result, they improve the efficiency of translation process.

Computer-assisted translation is a broad and imprecise term covering a range oftools, from the fairly simple to the more complicated. These can include:


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Spell checkers, either built into word processing software, or add-on

programs;

Grammar checkers, again either built into word processing software,

or add-on programs;

terminology managers, allowing the translator to manage his own

terminology bank in an electronic form. This can range from a simple

table created in the translator's word processing software or

spreadsheet, a database created in a program such as FileMaker

Proor, for more robust (and more expensive) solutions, specialized

software packages such as LogiTerm, MultiTerm, Termex, etc.

Dictionaries on CD-ROM, either unilingual or bilingual

Terminology databases, either on CD-ROM or accessible through theInternet, (such asThe Open Terminology Forum,TERMIUM or Grand

dictionnaire terminologique from the Office qubcois de la langue

franaise)

Full-text search tools (or indexers), which allow the user to query

already translated texts or reference documents of various kinds. In

the translation industry one finds such indexers as Naturel, ISYS

Search Software and dtSearch.

Concordancers, which are programs that retrieve instances of a wordor an expression and their respective context in a monolingual,

bilingual or multiligual corpus, such as a bitext or a translation

memory.

Bitexts, a fairly recent development, the result of merging a source

text and its translation, which can then be analyzed using a full-text

search tool or a concordancer.

Project management software that allows linguists to structure

complex translation projects, assign the various tasks to differentpeople, and track the progress of each of these tasks.

Translation memory managers (TMM), tools consisting of

a databaseof text segments in a source language and their

translations in one or more target languages.

Systems that are nearly automatic as in machine translation, but allow

user decisions for ambiguous cases. These are sometimes called human-

aided machine translation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMakerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMakerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROMhttp://www.terminologie.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TERMIUM&action=edit&redlink=1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_dictionnaire_terminologiquehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_dictionnaire_terminologiquehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aisehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aisehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_searchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISYS_Search_Softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISYS_Search_Softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitexthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_searchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_searchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Databasehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMakerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMakerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROMhttp://www.terminologie.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TERMIUM&action=edit&redlink=1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_dictionnaire_terminologiquehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_dictionnaire_terminologiquehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aisehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aisehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_searchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISYS_Search_Softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISYS_Search_Softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitexthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_searchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-text_searchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_softwarehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Databasehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processing


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Terminology management software

Terminology management software provides the translator a means of automatically searching a given

terminology database for terms appearing in a document, either by automatically displaying terms in

the translation memory software interface window or through the use of hot keys to view the entry in

the terminology database. Some programs have other hotkey combinations allowing the translator toadd new terminology pairs to the terminology database on the fly during translation. Some of the more

advanced systems enable translators to check, either interactively or in batch mode, if the correct

source/target term combination has been used within and across the translation memory segments in a

given project.

Mintistry of education, science and sports of Ukraine

II. Rkczi Ferenc Transcarpathian Hungarian Institute

Department of Philology

TRANSLATIONINTHEINFORMATIONTECHNOLOGY

ERA

Ildik Olasz


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English

3rd year

Beregszsz

2012.

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Technology era in literary translation