Transcript TEACHING COMPUTER-AIDED TRANSLATION (CAT) TOOLS

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 agrochemical 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 – 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=1
9960418ES.pdf&LANGUE=ES .
‘target species'
Translation Memory (TM)
Human translator
works on Text A
Human translator
works on Text B
database
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 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”
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 crisscross 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