Electronic Tools and Resources for Translators

Abstract

Translation is a highly technologized profession. This article describes tools and resources associated with the work of translators. These include electronic dictionaries, termbanks, terminology management systems, term-extraction tools, corpora, corpus-processing tools, and translation memory tools and social networking. In contemporary approaches, computer-aided translation is generally set off from machine translation (MT). Electronic dictionaries have been familiar for centuries. Termbanks share a number of similarities with electronic dictionaries. Search results can be displayed in user-definable ways in electronic dictionaries. They can be integrated into common editing environments. A corpus is a collection of texts held in electronic form. A terminology-extraction tool can be optimized to automatically extract candidate terms from a given corpus, using one or both of two basic approaches. Terminology management is about storing, retrieving, and displaying terms and associated data. Although MT may not be displacing human translation, translation memory technology envisages greater automation in the future.