Electronic Tools for Translators Translation Practices Explained Series

Electronic Tools for Translators offers complete explanations of a wide range of software products, information resources and online services that translators now need to understand and use. Individual chapters run through the origins and nature of the internet, the many ways of searching for information, and translation resources on the web, CD-ROMs as information sources, computer-assisted terminology management, the use and construction of corpora, translation memories, localization tools, and the incorporation of machine translation programmes into the translation process.

Austermühl explains all these tools and resources in a clear, step-by-step way, suggesting learning tasks and activities for each chapter and guiding the reader through the jargon. Examples are drawn from English, French, German and Spanish. The book can be used as a text in regular classes on computer-assisted translation, in translation practice classes, as well as for self-learning by professionals wishing to update their skills.

1. Translation in the information age

The need for electronic tools

Typologies of translation tools

The process-oriented approach

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

2. Translator–client communication and information transfer

The use of e-mail, FTP and WWW-based working groups

Transfer options

Optimizing online file transfer

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

3.Translation and the Internet

The basics of the Internet

Internet services

The worldwide web

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

4. Searching the web

Web search strategies 1 – institutional search via URLs

Web search strategies 2 – thematic search via subject trees

Web search strategies 3 – word search via search engines

Evaluating web documents

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

5. Translation resources on the worldwide web

Accessing national libraries online

Browsing in virtual bookstores

Encyclopedias and dictionaries

Multilingual terminology databases

Newspaper and magazine archives

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

6. The world on a disk – Translation resources on CD-ROM

The advantages of CD-ROMs

Translation resources available on CD-ROM

Strategies for accessing information on CD-ROM

Reference works: Two case studies

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

7. Computer-assisted terminology management

Forms of terminology management – from file cards to hypermedia systems

Managing terminological data using terminology management systems

Managing terminological data with MultiTerm

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

8. Corpora as translation tools

A typology of corpora

Building and analysing customized corpora

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

9. Déjà Vu?- Translation memories and localization tools

Translation memory systems

Working with a translation memory tool: Trados' Translator's Workbench

Software localization tools

A localization case study – Corel Catalyst

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

10. A translator's sword of Damocles? An introduction to machine translation

Popular conceptions about machine translation

Machine translation and the roller coaster of history

Machine translation – definitions, architectures and quality demands

MT architectures

Strategies for optimizing the quality of MT output

The practical use of MT technology – high-end versus low-end systems

Notorious problems in MT

MT on the Internet

Tasks

Further reading and Internet links

Glossary

References

Index