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
Biography
Austermuhl, Frank
