The module explores the practical aspects of the use of computers in translation, and covers important theoretical issues as well. The students familiarise themselves with popular translation software, look at available web-translation opportunities and learn when and when not computers should be used in translation. Special emphasis is laid on areas where Machine Translation has already proven its efficiency and on translation tools such as Translation Memory programs which have emerged as indispensable for professional translators. In addition, students are given opportunities to experiment with and evaluate actual translation software.
Students attending this module will be able to formulate and carry through experiments using an appropriate methodology (Machine Translation; Translation Memory; Bilingual concordancing); students will familiarise themselves with areas in which it is appropriate to use of computers in translation and will learn where it should not be used; students will acquire practical experience of working with Machine Translation packages.
- D. Arnold, L. Balkan, R. Lee Humphreys, S. Meijer and L. Sadler. 1994. Machine Translation. An Introductory guide. Blackwell publishers. (On-line version in ps and pdf format available at http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/MTbook/.
- F. Austerm 2001. Electronic tools for translators. St.Jerome publishing
- B. Esselink, 2000. A practical Guide to Localization. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- J. Hutchins and H. Somers. 1992. Introduction to Machine Translation. Academic Press.
- Arturo Trujillo. 1999. Translation Engines: Techniques for Machine Translation. Springer-Verlag
- Mitkov. 2003 (Ed). The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford University Press
- Proceedings of the Aslib conference "Translating and the computer". Alib, The Association for information management.
- Babelize - program which repeatedly translates back and forth an English phrase.
- Machine translation or Faulkner? : A quiz to try to tell William Faulkner's prose from machine-translated text.
- Yahoo! directories
- Google directories
- Open directory project
- Library of the US Congress
- French national library
- The British library
- A large collection of monolingual and multilingual dictionaries
- Specialist dictionaries
- Merriam-Webster dictionary
- Meta dictionaries
- Net Jargon
- Britannica
- Wikipedia
- CIA World Factbook
- Encarta Online
- European Commissions multilingual term bank
- United Nations Multilingual Terminology Database
- Euro terminology
- EU terminological information system
- Translation engines between lots of language pairs
- Web as a corpus - very useful to investigate languages for which there are no corpora available.
- Bank of English
- Online Corpora in different languages
- English-Chinese parallel corpus
- Open source parallel corpus