Coverage of this Encyclopedia
Part 3: Specific topics in translation technology
Whereas topics in the first two parts are on the whole of a more general nature, the 18 topics in Part 3, written by 21 scholars, are more specific to translation technology. These chapters have been arranged in alphabetical order for easy reference, beginning with Alignment and
ending with Translation Management Systems. Alignment, the first chapter of this part, is written by Lars Ahrenberg of Linköping University, Sweden. His chapter covers the main algorithms and systems for sentence alignment and word alignment. The focus is on statistical properties of bi-texts and the way these properties are exploited for alignment in generative as well as discriminative and heuristic models. In addition, this chapter provides an overview of standard evaluation metrics for alignment performance, such as precision, recall and Alignment Error Rate. Bi-text is the topic discussed by Alan Melby, Yves Savourel and Lucia Morado Vázquez. Zhang Yihua of the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, writes on computational lexicography, an area which is closely related to translation technology. Computational lexicography, according to the author, has gone through decades of development, and great achievements have been obtained in building and using corpora, which contribute enormously to the development of lexicographical databases and computer- aided dictionary writing and publishing systems. Computer lexicography is also closely associated with machine translation as all MT systems have electronic dictionaries. The topic of concordancing is covered by Federico Zanettin of the University of Perugia, Italy. This chapter provides an historical overview of concordances and concordancers, describes how different types of corpus resources and tools can be integrated into a computer-assisted translation environment, and examines a set of parameters, including data search and display options, which may be used to evaluate concordancing applications. Controlled languages, a topic of considerable interest to translation technologists, are described by Rolf Schwitter of Macquarie University in Australia. Controlled languages are subsets of natural languages which use a restricted vocabulary and grammar in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity and complexity. Some of these controlled languages are designed to improve communication between humans. Some of them make it easier for non-native speakers to read technical documentation. Some aim to improve the quality of machine translation, and another group of controlled languages serve as high-level interface languages to semantic systems where automated reasoning is important.
It is generally recognized that corpus is important both in lexicography and translation technology. The chapter on corpus is written by Li Lan of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her chapter introduces the important advances in corpus-based translation studies, presents detailed information on standard monolingual and bilingual corpora, and argues that both can help translators to establish equivalence, terminology and phraseology between languages. In addition, corpus-based quantitative and qualitative methods can help to verify, refine or clarify translation theories. The topic of editing in translation technology is authored by Christophe Declercq, who also writes a chapter on translation technology in the United Kingdom in Part 2. He covers a number of areas in this topic, including language and translation technology, ‘traditional’ translation technology and editing, cognitive processes and editing, forms of editing, revision and proof-reading, post-editing and machine translation, and post-editing guidelines. The topic of information retrieval and text mining is covered in the chapter co- authored by Kit Chunyu of the City University of Hong Kong and Nie Jianyun of the University of Montreal in Canada. They discuss the main operations in information retrieval and issues in text mining. Sue Ellen Wright, of Kent State University in the United States, explores the issues of language codes in the next chapter of this book. Her colleague at the same university, Keiran J. Dunne, writes on the topic of localization, which covers most of the essential points of this subject. Olivia Kwong Oi Yee of the City University of Hong Kong contributes a chapter on natural language processing. According to her, the primary concern of natural language processing is the design and implementation of computational systems for analysing and understanding human languages to automate certain real-life tasks demanding
human language abilities. It is typically a multidisciplinary endeavour, drawing on linguistics, computer science, mathematics and psychology amongst others, with a particular focus on computational models and algorithms at its core. The chapter on online translation is written by Federico Gaspari of the University of Bologna, Italy. It concerns key aspects of online translation, focusing on the relationship between translators and the Web, with a review of the latest trends in this area. A wide range of Internet-based resources, tools and services for translators are presented, highlighting their key features and discussing their pros and cons.
Felipe Sánchez-Martínez of the Universitat d’Alacant in Spain writes on part-of-speech tagging. Part-of-speech tagging is a well-known problem and a common step in natural language processing applications; part-of-speech taggers try to assign the correct part of speech to all words of a given text. This chapter reviews the main approaches to part-of-speech tagging and their use in machine translation. Segmentation is a topic discussed by Freddy Choi. His chapter introduces text segmentation, covers all the elements that make up a working algorithm, key considerations in a practical implementation, and the impact of design decisions on the performance of a complete machine translation solution. The narrative offers a survey of existing design options and recommendations for advancing the state-of- the-art and managing current limitations. Lee Tan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong writes on speech translation. According to the author, speech translation is an advanced computer-based technology that enables speech communication between people who speak different languages. A speech translation system is an integration of speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. The latest systems are available as smartphone applications. They can perform translation of naturally spoken sentences and support multiple languages. Jorge Díaz Cintas of University College London writes on subtitling and technology. His chapter highlights some of the most significant technological milestones that have been reached in the field of subtitling and considers more recent developments in this arena, such as machine translation and cloud subtitling. Kara Warburton, an experienced terminologist residing in Hong Kong, writes on terminology management. Her chapter provides an introduction to Terminology as a field of applied linguistics and as a strategic pursuit in information technology. It covers relations to lexicology, basic concepts and principal theories, methods and workflows for managing terminologies, uses of terminology, connections with corpora, terminology databases, and standards and best practices. Alan Melby and Sue Ellen Wright discuss translation memory and the computer-aided translation in the translation environment tools, sub-segment identification, advantages of a translation memory, how to create, use, and maintain a translation memory, history of translation memory, and the future developments and industry impact of translation memory. The last chapter in this volume is on translation management systems, written by Mark Shuttleworth of University College London. He traces the history of translation management, studies its common features, and estimates the future of technology in the field of translation. Computerized translation management systems have been in existence since the late 1990s. They were introduced in order to enable translation companies and individual translators to remain in control of ever-increasing volumes of content and to facilitate the monitoring of business, process and language aspects of translation and localization projects.
Conclusion
With five leading scholars in the field serving as Consultant Editors and around 50 eminent specialists contributing their chapters to this volume, this encyclopedia, the first of its kind, is a valuable and definitive reference in the field of translation technology. It is hoped that
specialists and general readers will find this encyclopedia informative and useful, while professionals will find the knowledge they gain from this volume helpful in translation practice.
References
Bowker, Lynne (2002) Computer-aided Translation Technology: A Practical Introduction, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
First and foremost, I would like to thank Andrea Hartill, Publisher at Routledge, for giving me an opportunity to fulfill my wish to edit the first encyclopedia of translation technology. Without her support and encouragement, this volume would not be able to see the light of day. Isabelle Cheng, who is in charge of the project, is the nicest and most helpful editor that I have ever worked with. Their contribution to the publication of this volume is invaluable and unsurpassed.
My most sincere gratitude goes to Professor David Pollard, former Professor of Translation and Chairman of the Department of Translation of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. It was through David’s recommendation that resulted in the publication of this volume.
My thanks are due to all the five Consultant Editors of this encyclopedia, namely, Professor Lynne Bowker, Professor David Farwell, Dr. W. John Hutchins, Professor Alan K. Melby, and Professor William S-Y. Wang, whose support to this volume is indispensable in its completion. Alan Melby, in particular, deserves a special note of thank not only for his contribution of two chapters, but also for recommending prominent scholars in the field to contribute chapters to this volume.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Miss Florence Li Wing Yee, my colleague at the Department of Translation of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, for her dedicated and tireless efforts to prepare this volume for publication, and Miss Sara Román Galdrán for preparing the index.
Chan Sin-wai The Editor and Publisher would like to thank the following copyright holders for permission to use material featured in the following chapters.
Figure “Dashboard of SDL-Trados 2014”, featured in Chan, Sin-wai, Computer-aided Translation: Major Concepts. Used with kind permission of SDL PLC.
Figures “A KWIC concordance of the word ‘translation’ (from the Sketch Engine)” and “A search for the lemma have immediately followed by a verb (from the Sketch Engine)”, featured in Zanettin, Federico, Concordancing. Used with kind permission of Lexical Computing Ltd. Figure “Left-side concordance tree of the word ‘translation’ (from Luz’s TEC browser)”, featured in Zanettin, Federico, Concordancing. Used with kind permission of Saturnino Luz.
Figure “‘verb + one’s way + preposition’ constructions in the 155 billion word Google Books Corpus of American English (from Davies’ corpus.byu.edu)”, featured in Zanettin, Federico, Concordancing. Used with kind permission of Mark Davies.
Figure “Parallel concordance ordered according to target language (from Barlow’s ParaConc)”, featured in Zanettin, Federico, Concordancing. Used with kind permission of Michael Barlow. Screenshots “Detail of the Editor Environment of SDL Trados Studio 2011 (SP1), with 3+1+4+1 Units” and “Overview of SDL Products and Segment status in SDL Trados Studio 2011”, featured in Declercq, Christophe, Editing in Translation Technology. Copyright © 2014 SDL plc. All Rights Reserved
Tables and/or figures “Editing Stages in an Overall Quality Assurance Approach (Makoushina and Kockaert 2008: 3)” ,“ How EN15038 could possibly set editing apart from review, revision and proof-reading”, “Light and Full Post-editing of Raw MT Output” (O’Brien 2010: 5) and “TAUS Post-editing Guidelines versus Quality Assurance in SDL Trados Studio 2011”, featured in Declercq, Christophe, Editing in Translation Technology. Used with kind permission of EUATC.
Screenshot “Various translation workflows possible in XTM Cloud”, featured in Declercq, Christophe, Editing in Translation Technology. Used with kind permission of XTM International Ltd.
Figure “Detail of the Editor Environment of SDL Trados Studio 2011 (SP1)”, featured in Declercq, Christophe, Editing in Translation Technology. Source text used by kind permission of Golazo media.
Figure “Anatomy of a Unicode Locale ID”, featured in Wright, Sue Ellen, Language Codes and Language Tags. Image © S.R. Loomis and M. Davis, 2010. Used with kind permission. Figure “Sub-languages drop-down menu, MultiTerm™ 2011”, featured in Wright, Sue Ellen, Language Codes and Language Tags. Used with kind permission of SDL PLC.
Figure “Localization of a Sample Application Named Scribble Using a Visual Localization Tool. The Left-hand Pane Displays the Resource Tree, the Middle Pane Displays the Selected Resource in WYSIWYG Mode, and the Right-hand Pane Displays the Corresponding Source and Target Strings in Tabular Format”, featured in Dunne, Keiran, Localization. Used with kind permission of SDL PLC.
Figure “Interface of the Professional Subtitling Program WinCAPS Qu4antum”, featured in Díaz Cintas, Jorge, Technological Strides in Subtitling. Used with kind permission of Screen Systems.
Figure “A Workflow for Prescriptive Terminology”, featured in Warburton, Kara, Terminology Management. Created for the Starter Guide for Terminology SIG by TerminOrgs. Used with kind permission of TerminOrgs http://www.terminorgs.net.
Figure “Side-by-side Segment Display”, featured in Melby, Alan K and Wright, Sue Ellen, Translation Memory. Used with kind permission of SDL PLC.
Figure “Specifying Client and Subject Area in Déjà Vu X2 Workgroup”, featured in Shuttleworth, Mark Translation Management Systems. Used with kind permission of Atril.
Figure “Selecting a Workflow in XTM 7.0”, featured in Shuttleworth, Mark, Translation Management Systems. Used with kind permission of XTM International.
Figure “Screenshot of the OTM 5.6.6 iPhone interface (image taken from http://www.lsp. net/otm-mobile-devices.html)”, featured in Shuttleworth, Mark, Translation Management Systems. Used with kind permission of OTM.
While we have made every effort to contact copyright holders of material used in this volume, we would be grateful to hear from any we were unable to reach.