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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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????

• Green food??

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???? (2)

• . http//www.tjjx.gov.cn/weibanju/lsshp/lsh6.htm
• ....... ???????????????
• ?????????????????
• ??????????????,???????
• ? ??????????????A???AA???????,????????????????????
  ??????????,? ?? ??????????????? ???????????????

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???? (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."

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Bilingual websites eg European Parliament
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• 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/calend
  ar?APPPDFTYPEPV2FILE19960418ES.pdfLANGUEES
  .
• target species'

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Translation Memory (TM)

• Human translator
• works on Text A database
• Human translator
• works on Text B

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Machine Translation (MT)

• Computer
• translates text A human
• translator post-edits (corrects)

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Translation Memory (TM) tools

• DejaVu
• TRADOS
• SDLX
• Star Transit.

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• An example from SDLX TM System

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One source text, one target text
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Aligning source and target texts
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New text to which TM has been applied
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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

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Now translated as China Along the Yellow River,
by Cao Jinqing, translated by Nicky Harman and
Huang Ruhua, published RoutledgeCurzon 2005
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English translations Original Chinese Comment-Source
agricultural levies, the tax burden on the peasants ????
Agricultural Machinery Station ??? 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 ???? 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 ?? cf ???? synonymous in this book with northern plains
civil society ???? 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/civil20society.pdf
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SDLX TermBase
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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/M
  T01.pdf
• by Dr S Reinhardt, University of Osnabrueck in
  Germany.

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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

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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