Electronic Tools for Translators

Frank Austermühl

ISBN 1-900650-34-7 c. 140pp. 2001. £Pb. £15/$26.50, inc. postage & packing

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.

St. Jerome Publishing
2 Maple Road West, Brooklands
Manchester M23 9HH, UK
Tel. +44 161 973 9856 / Fax +44 161 905 3498
Email: stjerome@compuserve.com

Contents

How to use this book

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

· TasksFurther 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