últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

PABLO CANCELO–EVALUATION OF MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEMS
RTF or MS Word DOC file. The new source document and corresponding translation are
saved as RTF files (the name of translated files contains a .TRA extension).
Before initiating a translation, the following precautions are recommended:
Perform a spell check of the source text.
Put any words not to be translated into [square brackets].
Avoid excessive use of capitalized words and quotation marks.
Check punctuation and add words not found by the spell-checker to the
dictionary.
After the desired text is ready translation may be undertaken either automatically or
interactively. In interactive mode, the program works with a sentence at a time, giving the
user a chance to choose between several possible interpretations. Interactive translation
provides the best results. For each word, phrase, clause or sentence translated, the
dictionary lists alternatives that may include synonyms, idioms, conjugated verbs or other
additional options such as gender and number in the case of Spanish.
The program comes with a four-module English-Spanish/Spanish-English
dictionary. The main module includes not only the word database but also links to idioms,
sayings, adverbial phrases and expressions. The dictionary contains brief descriptors,
translations, meanings, parts of speech and grammar tags. The Deluxe version is supplied
with icons referring to categories and synthesized voice. The latter suffers from the usual
drawback of voice synthesis – unnatural pronunciation – but does have the advantage of
requiring much less storage space than real human voice recordings.
Words in the dictionary databases are classified into 160 field categories. Some of
them are of a rather general type, others are more specific and represented by icons.
Information concerning usage level is also provided through colored icons: yellow means
daily use, red stands for normal use, blue when the word is rarely used, in case of
specialized terms and for colloquial or slang.
One of the most outstanding features of the program is the ability to display
meanings or translations in tree format, thus providing a bird’s eye view of the whole
syntactic content and different meanings or translations of a term. Compared to standard
dictionaries, the specification of lexical entries is rather limited, but sufficient for the
purposes of selecting translation alternatives.
The second module (Thesaurus) displays a complete list of synonyms of words,
sayings and expressions arranged in a double window in decreasing colored value. The
color codes appear on screen as follows.
The number indicates the number of times the terms are repeated in the list of
synonyms. The higher this number, the greater the affinity of the synonym with the original
term.
The third module deals with verb conjugation and successfully handles any regular
or irregular verb either in Spanish or English.
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