Evolution of Computer Terminology Translations with the SPOT Dictionary
Jiri Hynek, Premek Brada
Department of Computer Science & EngineeringFaculty of Applied SciencesUniversity of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic
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“On the quality of Czech translations of technical literature”
Apply filters Zažádej o filtry Ask for filters
Why the ICT translator’s work is hard What we can do to help alleviate it
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Standard translation process Translation, localization projects (books,
software) (up to) millions of words in various contexts team work (export, import, corpus sync) need for consistency, efficiency, quality
dictionaries, corpora, CAT tools
Problems a translator runs into grasp meaning of highly specialized terms be aware of already existing term translations
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Making term translations
Linguist, corpus, current dictionaries Months, years of preparatory work
and polishing Published dictionary
ICT context: process works well for “stable old-timers” like memory, disk, dialog window
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Troublemakers among words Old-timers Novas and supernovas Homonyms, synonyms Shifting sands Esoteric terms
… appear in books, papers, blogs, student works (diploma theses), documentation, software applications meet us daily
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Troublemakers (1) Synonyms (pull-down | drop-down) Common words in new meaning
Problems acceptance in non-original languages alternative translations – which is correct?
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Troublemakers (2) Supernovas, esoteric terms – spam,
phishing, blog, code closure, social bookmarking, refactoring, proxy, locale, box model, marshal, bean-managed persistence
Problems “explanatory translations” instead of terms narrow community users prefer original to translation
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Ways out
Translate only few books? Educate translators? Educate developers, L10N specialists?
… or …
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SPOT
Dictionary of (evolving, current, unsettled) ICT terminology translations
Goal = reconcile two forces terminology from users quality of resulting language
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Collective wisdom approach Community to create term translations Fruitful cooperation of linguists,
knowledgeable users, translators, and professionals (engineers, academics) complementary skills, contexts, knowledge
cf. COBUILD approach to capture language “as is” rather than “as should be”
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Key community supporting features
Dictionary searching browsing (letter,
category, project, status)
links Communication
comments voting
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Key professional support features
Editorial board translation quality
Translation projects isolation communication geographic distribution
Live term contexts Google search several context categories
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SPOT as corpus building tool
Translation settling process user adds term user adds translation (with notes) registered users comment, vote editor decides
correct vs deprecated translations
Projects developing local corpus in isolation publishing for general availability
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SPOT as dictionary and CAT Dictionary with added value
good/bad translations, comments, explanations context
… as compared to FOLDOC; slovnik.zcu.cz
On-line CAT tool corpus sharing and updating, discussion draw from already existing translations
… as compared to Google, reference.com, dictionary of math terminology, TU Brno