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

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

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.

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.

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.

绿色食品 Green food??

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。

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."

Bilingual websites eg European Parliament

DOMAIN – BIOTECHNOLOGYDictionary 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'

Translation Memory (TM)

Human translator

works on Text A database

Human translator

works on Text B

Machine Translation (MT)

Computer

translates text A human

translator post-edits (corrects)

Translation Memory (TM) tools

• DejaVu

• TRADOS

• SDLX

• Star Transit.

An example from SDLX TM System

One source text, one target text

Aligning source and target texts

New text to which TM has been applied

The TRADOS ProjectThis 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”

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

English translations Original Chinese Comment-Source

agricultural levies, the tax burden on the peasants

农民负担

Agricultural Machinery Station

农机站 The People's Government of Jishi Town Agricultural Machinery Station Corporate Service Station Comprehensive Statistics Station Land Resources Administration Office ...www.jishi.gov.cn/e-jg.htm -

brick and tile houses 砖瓦平房 zd-english

... south of the Yangtze River featuring criss-cross irrigation channels, forest networks in farmland, and brick-and-tile houses in the shade of trees. ...sts.zju.edu.cn/english2/unit2/textC.htm

central plains 中原 cf * 北方平原 synonymous in this book with northern plains*

civil society 市民社会 Civil Society in China: Concept and Reality ... Civil Society in People's Republic of China (PRC) is a rather new phenomenon, ... are probably the "Constructing Civil Society in China" written by Deng ...www.iwep.org.cn/chinese/gerenzhuye/ wangyizhou/wenzhang/civil%20society.pdf

SDLX TermBase

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.

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

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