Lecture 1.

Translator’s
Competences. Introduction to
Technology in Translation
What is to be covered and why
Assoc. Prof. Oryslava Bryska
August 31st, 2022
Competences
There is no way you can make a good translator
without knowing the basics of computer
technology
Please, consider:

• What does it mean TO LEAVERAGE?

• Why is there a talk about competition?
• What is meant by evolving demands of the marketplace?
Some statistics by field experts:
According to OPTIMALE project
(European-Union funded survey,
Please, consider:

TM MT Web L10n

Software Pre- and Terminology

L10n Post-editing management
Mainstream trends that effect translation
industry:
Equivalent to EU Master of Translation:
Technology diversity
The effect that the tools have on the overall work processes is to be considered prior to the choice of
technology tools in translation.

In general, the various technologies allow language to be processed in a paradigmatic way. That is,
they show the alternatives available at particular points in a text, interrupting the syntagmatic or
linear dimension of language.

A word-processing software, a spell-checker automatically compares your words with an electronic

dictionary. If you are unsure of the spelling or appropriateness of a word, you can quickly consult a
list of suggested spellings or synonyms. The tool thus gives a vertical list of alternatives, in addition
to the horizontal flow of the text. That list is paradigmatic. It interrupts the syntagmatic flow. The
technology imposes the paradigmatic on the syntagmatic. All translation technology does this to
some extent (Pym, 2014).
Please, consider:
• What is meant by paradigmatic vs syntagmatic links in a text?
• What are the benefits of the application of the paradigmatic
processing of the text?
 Management systems
Years ago, a team of translators might have been employed to render a whole software program or company
website into a particular language.

• To understand that process, you might consider the user-visible parts of the program or website as a text, and you
then assume that translators would render the whole of that text, with each translator more or less aware of the
overall product. In short, everyone would be aware of what was going on.

• Nowadays, software and websites are rarely developed in this way. What you find tends to be a constant flow of
modifications and updates, as one version gradually evolves into another. Just as new translations of the Bible
incorporate findings and solutions from previous translations, so new localizations of software and websites
make use of the material produced in previous localizations. This means the translators no longer work on whole
texts, not even on whole internationalized versions, but only on the new additions and modifications.
 Management systems
Imagine a company that has countless documents on all its products and operations. The company
markets its products in seven different languages, contacting its customers through a multilingual
website, user manuals, and publicity material. When an updated version of a product is being
prepared, the company is not going to rewrite and translate the entirety of all its previous documents.
It somehow has to isolate the additions and modifications, and to coordinate them so that the end
output is appropriate to all the media in which it is going to communicate. The key challenge is not
getting the translations done, but keeping track of all the pieces. To do this with any degree of
efficiency, the company has its information (“content”) broken down into units, usually of one or
several paragraphs (“chunks”), in such a way that these units can be updated individually and
combined in new ways to suit new purposes.
Content management systems
• The systems allow this process to be controlled with some efficiency
in one language;
• globalization management systems allow content to be coordinated
in many language versions.
• A change introduced in an English segment might thus automatically
signal that changes are needed in the corresponding segments in other
language versions.
XML and tagging
• Another level of coordinated control is made possible by XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is a technical standard
used to exchange content.
• Basically, information is tagged so that it can be retrieved later. The following is an example of a simple XML text:
<item>
<title>Pride and Prejudice</title> was written by <author>Jane
Austen</author>
in <year>1813</year>.
</item>
<item>
<title>Alice in Wonderland</title> was written by <author>Lewis
Carroll</author>
in <year>1866</year>.
</item>
By tagging texts in this way, you can later retrieve just the information on authors, for instance, for a textbook on literature.
Translation memories
• All electronic language technologies are based on enhanced memory
capacity, which is why they enable re-use. Translation-memory
tools, as the name suggests, bring this capacity closer to the process of
translation.
• Translation memories basically store previously translated
sentences or phrases (“segments”) in such a way that start
segments are matched with target segments (thus storing “bi-
texts”).
Benefits of TMs
• For text genres that are highly repetitive, there are real gains in the translator’s productivity. More
significant, though, is the way translation memories tend to impose uniform terminology and
phraseology across projects, ensuring that different translators use the same kind of language.
From the client’s perspective, and for many of the managers coordinating the work of translation
teams, this is one of the major benefits of translation memories: increased consistency can be just
as important as any gain in productivity.
Data-based machine translation
• The main recent advance has been the integration of machine translation
into translation-memory systems. In some cases this is fairly simple. If
the translation memory does not give you a full or fuzzy match, it can
present a suggested translation drawn from an online machine translation
system. The translation may not be perfect, but it is usually good enough
to justify a revision process (“post-editing”).
• Yet there is a lot more happening in machine translation than this simple
“Plan B” approach.
• Translators have spent decades claiming that machines will never be able
to translate. Now we have to reconsider what that means.
Data
The more successful machine translation systems are “data-based” or “statistical.” This means that, in
addition to linguistic mapping rules, they are able to search through large databases of bi-texts, propose
the most statistically likely pairs, and determine which of them are well-formed in the target language.
This is what Google Translate and Bing Translator are doing, online and for free. However, since 2016
GoogleTranslate changed into a neural MT (NMT) system developed by Google and introduced in
November 2016, that uses an artificial neural network to increase fluency and accuracy in Google
Translate.
Conclusions
• Technological competence
• TM
• MT
• CMS

H/A
• 1. Cover the material under the main chapters of the lecture
• 2. Do the practical task according to the instructions listed.
Practical Class 1. Intro and getting
starting with CAT tools - MemoQ
1. Cover the notes in Lecture 1 presentation. Prepare to discuss “Please, consider” sections.

2. Read the information in files ICT1 4, 6, 7, 9 attached and be able to discuss and what is possible to illustrate on your PC.

3. Getting started with CAT tools. Learn the terms:

https://helpcenter.memoq.com/hc/en-us/articles/6015071075217-1-Introduction

4. (in-class activity) Follow the steps: https://helpcenter.memoq.com/hc/en-us/articles/6015071111441-2-How-to-Begin

It is important that you claim a 4Free license during the installation of their memoQ desktop client: do that after the
software is installed and it is launched for the first time. The activation wizard will further assist you.

IMPORTANT:

You will get your credentials at the practical class!