HOW USEFUL IS TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY TRANSLATOR?

1. HOW USEFUL IS TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY TRANSLATOR? Nicky Harman, Lecturer, MSc in Scientific, Technical and Medical Translation with Translation Technology, Imperial College London University Nanjing, China, April 2005

2. Translation Technology tools mean….(1) • Advanced Word Processing functions • complex file management • understanding and manipulating complex file types • multilingual word processing • configuring templates and using tools such as using AutoText. • Information mining on the WWW • Translation Memory Systems • Machine Translation

3. Translation Technology tools mean …. (2) • Terminology Extraction and Management • Software and Web Localisation • Image Editing (Photoshop) • Corpora and Text Alignment • XML and the Localisation Process…. and much, much more.

4. Web Searching (1) With increasing globalisation, and rapid changes in the political and economic world in which translators work, we are faced with all sort of things which we cannot find in our dictionary, from neologisms and acronyms to new concepts, organisations and institutions.

5. Web wonders ‘Given the continued explosive increase in the size of the Web, the trend toward business organisations that cross national boundaries, and high levels of competition for consumers in a global marketplace, it seems impossible not to view multilingual content on the Web as an expanding resource. Moreover it is a dynamic resource, changing in content as the world changes.’ Philip Resnick, ‘Mining the Web for Bilingual Text’, in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1999.

6. 绿色食品 Green food??

7. 绿色食品 (2) . http://www.tjjx.gov.cn/weibanju/lsshp/lsh6.htm ....... 绿色食品生产所用肥料有哪些要求 ①保护和促进作物的生长和品质的提高； ②不造成作物产生和积累有害物，不影响人体健康 ③ 对生态环境无不良影响。无论是A级还是AA级绿色食品生产，肥料均要求以无害化处理的有机肥、生物有机肥和无机矿质肥料为主，生 物菌 肥、腐殖酸类、氨基酸类叶面肥作 为绿色食品生产过程的必要补充。

8. 绿色食品 (3)= organic food http://www.defra.gov.uk/farm/organic/introduction/ …….What is the definition of organic farming? The Compendium of UK Organic Standards as described in the above link define organic farming as: "Organic production systems are designed to produce optimum quantities of food of high nutritional quality by using management practices which aim to avoid the use of agro-chemical inputs and which minimise damage to the environment and wildlife. The principles include: Working with natural systems rather than seeking to dominate them The encouragement of biological cycles involving micro-organisms, soil flora and fauna, plants and animals The maintenance of valuable existing landscape features and adequate habitats for the production of wildlife, with particular regard to endangered species Careful attention to animal welfare considerations The avoidance of pollution Consideration for the wider social and ecological impact of the farming system."

9. Bilingual websites eg European Parliament

10. DOMAIN – BIOTECHNOLOGY Dictionary gives the Spanish term ‘diana’ as a noun, meaning target or bullseye. The term I am looking for ‘especies diana’ where especies means species, and diana is an adjective http://www3.europarl.eu.int/omk/omnsapir.so/calendar?APP=PDF&TYPE=PV2&FILE=19960418ES.pdf&LANGUE=ES . ‘target species'

11. Translation Memory (TM) Human translator works on Text A database Human translator works on Text B

12. Machine Translation (MT) Computer translates text A human translator post-edits (corrects)

13. Translation Memory (TM) tools • DejaVu • TRADOS • SDLX • Star Transit.

14. An example from SDLX TM System

15. One source text, one target text

16. Aligning source and target texts

17. New text to which TM has been applied

18. The TRADOS Project This what our students are asked to write about: • “brief summary of your responsibilities (e.g. project manager, translator, etc.), and brief description of how easy/difficult you found them and why; • any problems that were encountered (either by yourself or by the team as a whole) and how they were overcome; • how suited the software was to the tasks in hand;etc etc”

20. Now translated as China Along the Yellow River, by Cao Jinqing, translated by Nicky Harman and Huang Ruhua, published RoutledgeCurzon 2005

22. SDLX TermBase

23. Machine Translation (MT) and Translation Memory systems While MT systems sometimes produce howlers, there are many situations where the ability of MT systems to produce reliable, if less than perfect, translations at high speed is valuable. The METEO system, for example, is a serious, top-end MT system which has been in daily use since 1977. As of 1990, it was regularly translating around 45 000 words daily. In the 1980s, the diesel engine manufacturers Perkins Engines was saving around £ 4 000 and up to 15 weeks on each manual translated. Extracted from http://www.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/~reinhard/MT/MT01.pdf by Dr S Reinhardt, University of Osnabrueck in Germany.

24. Machine Translation (MT) and Translation Memory systems (2) • the complementary function of these two fundamentally different approaches to automating the translation process, • the possible future development of TM technology and • practical file format manipulation techniques for facilitating data exchange

25. Looking to the future ‘The key to evaluating translation technology is • providing a great breadth of coverage of the various tools, • backing up practice with theory, • placing the use of Translation Memory (TM) tools firmly in the broader context of other types of translation technology, and • beginning to imagine future developments in the field. Mark Shuttleworth, Course Leader, MSc in Technical Translation at Imperial College, London University