Traduco: A collaborative web-based CAT environment for the interpretation and translation of texts

Abstract

Traduco is a web-based collaborative tool aimed at supporting the translation of texts that pose particular challenging interpretative issues. Nowadays, Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools are mainly applied to the translation of technical manuals or legislative texts and are aimed at speeding up the translation process. Traduco extends most of the standard components of a traditional CAT tool with specific features necessary to support the interpretation and translation of complex texts (like the Babylonian Talmud, that we here present as a case study), which pose particular comprehension issues. Traduco goes beyond the translation and its printing: it includes features for the addition of notes and annotations and the creation of glossaries. Translators, editors, supervisors, and end-users accessing Traduco are able to use components that can ease the translation process through the use of CAT technologies, the supervision and managing of the whole process of translation and publishing, the exporting of translations and notes in standard formats for desktop publishing software and TEI format, and, soon, the possibility to perform automatic linguistic analysis of the text. Moreover, Traduco allows the users to insert notes, comments, annotations, and bibliographical references. The design and development of Traduco required the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach, leveraging on advances in software engineering, computational linguistics, knowledge engineering, and publishing.