practical aspects1 Translation Tools Translation Memory Systems Text Concordance Tools Useful Websites

practical aspects2 Translation Memory Systems General principles and features Scope of application with legal texts: pros and cons Demonstration of OmegaT Hands-on experience with OmegaT

practical aspects3 Principles and Features I Translate only once, re-use of already translated text:  Internal recurrence Segments, which are occur more than once in the source text and have not been translated before and thus have not been saved in the translation memory (exact matches) match propagation.  External recurrence text segments which have been previously translated in other texts and thus are saved in the translation memory Consistency of text and terminology: identical text will always be translated the same way

practical aspects4 Principles and Features II Keep format information intact that means separating text from layout information  edit text in an editor  use of filters for different file formats  import = replace layout information with placeholders  export = replace placeholders with original layout information

practical aspects5 How does it work?  the text is splitted up in text chunks (=segments) which can be sentences or paragraphs.  each segment is matched to the translation memory exact match fuzzy match match-percentage: value of minimal similarity between a new text segment to translate and a segment found in the memory  segments will be saved in pairs: source language text and target language text  these form translation units (TU) in translation memories

practical aspects6 Segmentation rules Sentence level  Pro: smaller text segments = higher reusability better matching  Con: sentence for sentence translation method, more post- editing needed Paragraph level  Pro: bigger text segments = better translation quality, less post-editing  Con: lower reusability

practical aspects7 Best context for the use of TM Conventionalized text structures Stereotypical formulations Identical macrostructure Frequent updates of a text

practical aspects8 Legal texts types Best suited for translation memory systems are highly standardized legal text types such as:  bylaws (e.g.  contracts, agreements (e.g.  sentences  administrative legal texts

practical aspects9 Commercial Software SDL Trados Translator's Workbench SDLX (SDL)‏ DejaVu (Atril)‏ Transit (Star)‏ MemoQ MultiTrans (Multicorpora)‏ Wordfast (Champollion)‏ Heartsome Translation Suite

practical aspects10 OmegaT OpenSource Translation Memory  requirements  Java Runtime Environment (

practical aspects11 Corpus and Concordance Tools A corpus is a collection of pieces of language that are selected and ordered according to explicit linguistic criteria in order to be used as a sample of the language. (EAGLES, 1996)‏ use of corpora: – Word frequency – Lexical context – Syntactic context – Semantic context – Style

practical aspects12 Legal Corpora Criteria for a legal corpus:  Legal system and language  General legal corpus (e.g. Austrian legal language) = extensive, very large to be representativ  Specific legal corpus (e.g. Austrian legal language for Civil Law) = still large  Specilized legal corpus (e.g. Austrian legal language for succession law) = manageable  Genre specific corpus (e.g. Austrian testaments) = very manageable and suited for translation purposes

practical aspects13 Concordance Tools TextStat2 berlin.de/textstat/software-en.htmlhttp:// berlin.de/textstat/software-en.html AntConc  Literature: Pearson, Jennifer; Bowker, Lynne (2002): Working with specialized language. a practical guide to using corpora. Routledge, London. Bowker, Lynne (2002): Computer-aided Translation Technology. A Practical Introduction. University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa..