Translator’s Workbench

Book excerpt: The Translator's Workbench Project was a European Community sponsored research and development project which dealt with issues in multi-lingual communication and docu mentation. This book presents an integrated toolset as a solution to problems in translation and docu mentation. Professional translators and teachers of translation were involved in the proc ess of software development, starting with a detailed study of the user requirements and ending with several evaluation-and-improvement cycles of the resulting toolset. English, German, Greek, and Spanish are addressed in the contributions, however, some of the techniques are inherently language-independent and can thus be extended to cover other languages as well. Translation can be viewed broadly as the execution of three cognitive processes, and this book has been structured along these lines: • First, the translation pre-process, understanding the target language text at a lexico semantic level on the one hand, and making sense of the source language document on the other hand. The tools for the pre-translation process include access to electronic networks, conversion of documents from one format to another, creation of terminol ogy data banks and access to existing data banks, and terminology dictionaries. • Second, the translation process, rendering sentences in the source language into equiva lent target sentences. The translation process refers to the potential of conventional machine translation systems, like METAL, and of the statistically oriented translation memory.