Overview of technologies for translators and language service providers Belinda Maia University of Porto

Translator as Language Services Provider MUST HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF: –Science and Technology –National and International Economics, Politics, Law and Current Affairs –Multimedia –Human Language Technologies - HLT –Information Society Technologies - IST MUST BE: –A Multidisciplinary Communicator –A Multimedia Communicator –AND an Intercultural Communicator

Translator as Intercultural Communicator MUST HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF: –Psycholinguistics –Contrastive linguistics –Sociolinguistics –Cultural theory –Literary theory MUST BE: –Multi-lingual and multi-culturally sensitive

Translator as Multimedia Communicator MUST HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF: –General IT as user –Special IT for translators – MT, CAT etc –Subtitling and Dubbing programmes –Web Pages –ETC MUST BE: –Computer literate and aware of new media

Information Society Technologies European Programme at: Focus on: –Technology for providing information –Language as vehicle of information –Language as structuring knowledge –Knowledge management

HLT(1) Calls for (research) proposals 1999/2000 MLIS (Multi Lingual Information Society) –the provision of multilingual language resources over global networks –the development of multilingual networked services

HLT(2) Calls for (research) proposals 2000/2001 Multilingual communication services and appliances –Multilingual e-service and e-commerce –Natural and multilingual interactivity –Multilingual web –Multimodal and multi-sensorial dialogue modes

HLT (3) Calls for (research) proposals 2002/6 – Focus on –Knowledge and Interface Technologies Multi-modal interfaces Semantic-based knowledge systems –Cognitive systems –Bio-inspired Intelligent Information Systems

Multimodal Interfaces Multilingual Communication – > Facilitating translation for unrestricted domains, especially for spontaneous (unrestricted) or ill-formed (speech) inputs in task oriented settings. Areas to be addressed include:

Multimodal Interfaces human-to-human; human-to-things; human-to-self; human-to-content; device-to-device; human-to-embodied robots.

Multimodal Interfaces Areas to be addressed include: speech-to-speech translation; statistical/mixed approaches to translation; adaptive techniques, incorporating learning; robustness of approach.

Don’t forget HLT research proposals are for cutting- edge technology The results will be in the future But the future is coming!

Technology FOR Translators Machine translation (MT) Machine assisted translation (MAT) Internet for information retrieval Corpora use Terminology Management Multimedia tools Summarisation and Revision

MT – a threat, a solution or a tool? A threat? Under present circumstances - No A solution? Partially > ‘gist’ translation A tool? Increasingly > + pre- and post- editing OR Human Assisted MT (HAMT)

On-line MT engines –BabelfishBabelfish –FreeTranslationFreeTranslation –WorldLingoWorldLingo –SystranSystran –GoogleGoogle –E-Translation ServerE-Translation Server –AmikaiAmikai

Online MT - uses Training in awareness of lexical and syntactic difficulties for both human and machine translation Our experiment with METRA It gets hundreds of hits per day, so who is using it? A lot of translators….. !

MAHT Commercial Programmes SDL + TRADOS - Check DÉJA VU STAR - TRANSIT group.net/eng/home.htmlhttp:// group.net/eng/home.html WORDFAST -

MAHT Basic tools Translation memories (TMs) + concordancer TM created: –As translator works –Using text aligner on previous texts + translations Terminology database created: –Pre-translation by terminologist / company / translator –Post- translation by aligning terms in text and translation

MAHT Additional tools Spelling and grammar checkers – in Word Machine Translation File formatting facilities Terminology > knowledge databases Project Management facilities ETC For further details come to the commercial sessions on Wednesday!

eCoLoRe Training kits for TM technology Problem: OK – we have bought the TM software for our university – but it is empty!  Solutions? Make your own TMs  eCoLoRe at

Translation technology - Needs To find, keep and re-use information To work within multimedia technology Good understanding of Linguistics Understanding of how/why spelling and grammar checkers, MT, and other HLTs do(n’t) work

Using the Internet To find information Understanding how the internet works Using browsers intelligently To keep information Collecting site links Downloading useful information To convert information to knowledge Studying special subjects

Internet information Eurodicautom, online terminology, glossaries, dictionaries On-line encyclopedias – e.g. Wikipedia Translators’ pages Translators’ forums and mailing lists Systematic finding, analysing and storage of relevant information / knowledge

Monolingual Corpora as tools Large quantities of varied types of text British National Corpus (BNC) – online at: Linguateca – Portuguese corpora – online at: PLEASE inform of others!

Multilingual Corpora as tools EU documents at: Parallel corpora (Translation Memories?) –E.g. COMPARA > EN & PT (literary) online at: – 1 million x 2 Comparable corpora – originals in different languages, but same domain and/or genre

Corpora - uses Monolingual corpora – finding the right word or collocation Multilingual / parallel corpora – finding terminology and translation suggestions Comparable corpora – discovering expert terminology and local text conventions

Terminology > Knowledge From:  The ‘right word’  Glossaries / dictionaries  Databases  Thesauri  Conceptual organization  Ontologies  Knowledge databases

Corpógrafo – integrated suite of online tools Corpora construction and analysis Semi-automatic term extraction Concept databases Traditional terminology fields Semi-automatic extraction of definitions and semantic relations Visualization of concept systems / ontologies Produced by Linguateca – PoloCLUP and freely available at:

Multimedia translation Localization XML Sub-titling Dubbing Web-pages Software for interpreters Speech-to-speech machine translation & interpretation?

Other skills ± software Revision Translation evaluation Summarization Terminology management Information retrieval Project management

Linguistics Essential training for translators –General linguistics –Contrastive linguistics Translators > language experts > new specializations –Natural language processing –Translation and terminology tools

Group work How much of this technology do you Use? Find useful? -Know about? -Believe to be useful? -Don’t know about? -Want to find out more about? -Believe to be (ir)relevant to translating as a profession?