Topics in Language Resources for Translation ... - ymerleksi - home

Chapter 9. BEYTrans 1391. Facilitating Collaborative Translation. The current movement away fromstand-alone systems and toward online environments which facilitate networkingis likely to continue (Bowker 2002), thus making it possible for multipleusers to share the same TMs, machine translation (MT) systems, andvarious language resources. Our environment has to consistently unify thecollaborative management of documents in various multilingual formats. Acommon awareness among participating translators of the current state of thetranslation is important. Our environment is hence designed to allow differenttranslation versions to be retained and controlled as the translation progress.The same requirements are applied to language resources. As a matter of fact,dictionary entries can also be modified by volunteers and become immediatelyavailable on the Web. It is also necessary to integrate the functions thatfacilitate communication among translators, so they can be informed of anymodification of the content and can discuss problematic issues. The Wikiarchitecture supports the basic functions necessary for online collaborativeworking environments, thus we use Wiki as the basis of BEYTrans. We willelaborate on this in Section 4 below.2. Managing Language Resources. We categorise resources into two separategroups. The first category is language resources, which include dictionaries,glossaries and terminology banks or databases, etc. In order to provide a varietyof language resources to meet the specific needs of volunteer translators,existing dictionaries and glossaries are collected and pre-processed for importationinto our environment. The second category is TMs, which aim tomanage translation units (TUs). TMs can be enhanced by adding new pairs ofunits during translation or by automatically recycling matching pairs of unitsfrom previous translations in the repository of the translation community orfrom the Web. A system that specifically aims at recycling existing translationdocument pairs, not “parallel” texts, is currently being developed (Kageuraet al. 2007). The technical aspects of language resource management will bediscussed in Section 5.3. Providing an Integrated Environment and Multilingual Web Editor. Translatorsrequire a uniform environment within which they can access necessary functionseasily. The system, therefore, should provide an integrated environmentto translators, including a collaborative working environment, language resourcemanagement, and an effective interface for making translations, thatreflects the actual workflow of translators. It should also be kept in mindthat many of the community-based translation projects are concerned withmore than two language pairs. For translators to work in a truly collaborativemanner within such projects, therefore, it is necessary to provide a translationeditor that allows multiple language translators to share TMs and documentsfor translation. A rich online editor for direct and collaborative translation