Good Quality Translation Research Articles

The development of the Quality of Translation and Linguistic Equivalence Checklist

The International Test Commission (ITC) established guidelines for test adaptations. The ITC encourages the adaptation of locally developed measures with proven validity. A good quality translation process ensures that the same meaning is conveyed from the source to the target language. Through test adaptation, researchers focus on cultural differences between the source and the target language to maintain linguistic equivalence. Research involving adaptation has systematically failed to report on the rigour of the translation process and to make translation part of the empirical process. The ITC guidelines are generally referred to; however, the assessment of the quality of translations and the process of establishing linguistic equivalence remain an important research focus. This study reports on the development of the Quality of Translation and Linguistic Equivalence Checklist (QTLC). The construction of the QTLC was based on ITC guidelines. The QTLC consists of two sections, translation and linguistic equivalence, and produced section scores with accompanying quality descriptions. The draft instrument was presented to three independent reviewers. Once feedback was incorporated, the QTLC was piloted in an ongoing study on the translation of the E3SR. Two reviewers applied the checklist, and inter-rater reliability was established. The Kappa statistic (0.78) tested significant at a 0.00 alpha level, indicating substantial agreement between the raters on the quality of the translation process and equivalence. Four items were identified as functioning differently and were subsequently revised. The QTLC appears to be a robust checklist assessing the quality of translations and the process of establishing linguistic equivalence.

Empirical Analysis of Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation System for English to Hindi Language

Hindi is the national language of India. However, most of the Government records, resolutions, news, etc. are documented in English which remote villagers may not understand. This fact motivates to develop an automatic language translation system from English to Hindi. Machine translation is the process of translating a text in one natural language into another natural language using computer system. Grammatical structure of Hindi language is very much complex than English language. The structural difference between English and Hindi language makes it difficult to achieve good quality translation results. In this paper, phrase-based statistical machine translation approach (PBSMT) is used for translation. Translation, reordering and language model are main working components of a PBSMT system. This paper evaluates the impact of various combinations of these PBSMT system parameters on automated English to Hindi language translation quality. Freely available n-gram-based BLEU metric and TER metric are used for evaluating the results.

Conjunction Shifts and their Impact on Translation Quality of Orwell’s Animal Farm

This study aims at identifying conjunction shifts and their impact on the translation quality of Orwell’s Animal Farm in accuracy and acceptability aspects. This descriptive qualitative research is an embedded-cased study and oriented to translation products. The data were collected by document analysis and focus group discussion and then analyzed by Spradley’s data analysis method. The results show that 207 data of conjunction shifts in terms of form, expression, function, major classification meaning, categorical meaning, and sub-categorical meaning affect translation quality. The assessment of translation quality of conjunctions that shifted in the translation of the novel Animal Farm results in an average accuracy score of 2.09 and an average acceptability score of 2.84. Even though they are less accurate, the translation results of conjunctions that shifted in the translation of the novel are quite acceptable. This implies that translators should master on form, expression, function, and meaning of conjunctions so as to produce a good quality translation result.

The Translation of Qur’an Non-Existent Cultural Elements in Malay Culture: An Analysis on Borrowing Approach

Many translation scholars have proposed various approaches when dealing with culture-specific items. It shows that to achieve a good quality and successful translation work, suitable and functional translation approach should be applied by the translator. Borrowing is one of the approaches applied in various texts’ genre such as sacred text which has culture-specific items. It becomes frequently used in translating word with no equivalent in target language. However, it resulted in some of translations which have applied this kind of approach did not supply adequate meaning and fallout the irrelevant text towards readership. The reason is that borrowing approach stands alone without providing compensation strategies. Therefore, this present article investigates the functionality of borrowing approach in translating Qur’an non-existent cultural elements in Malay culture. This study is qualitative, and the data are analysed descriptively using document analysis by adopting Relevance Theory initiated by Sperber and Wilson (1986). It is suggested that the relevancy of translated text can be achieved not only through borrowing as an approach, but at the same time providing adequate meaning by means of compensation strategies. Thus, the study assumes that the less the effort processing is produced to understand the meaning, the higher the contextual effect of meaning is sufficiently provided. On the other hand, if the effort processing is less produced and the contextual effect is highly provided, the optimum relevancy of translated text can be achieved. It is concluded that the combination of borrowing approach and compensation strategies can help better understanding the meaning of non-existent religious cultural items in Malay culture.

TRANSLATING POETRY: CAN YOU LEARN IT?

This paper is an attempt to describe the process through which a translator needs to go when translating poetry. Poetry has been part of human civilization since the earliest times; it has derived from the oral tradition and has evolved through centuries into a distinct genre with particular characteristics in terms of structure, form, style, language and other specific features which differentiate it from prose. In the past, poetry has been translated mostly by poets; nevertheless, it seems possible that an individual who has been properly trained and with some practice and passion can produce good quality translation of poetic works. An exercise in translation of a seventeenth-century poem by Andrew Marvell in this paper is based on theory of equivalence to show several aspects of translating, namely the visual, semantic and aesthetic ones, which could pose challenges for translators but which could be addressed and overcome with adequate training. The translator needs to approach a poem and use equivalent means as much as possible to re-create the work by bridging the gaps pertaining to cultural, historical and linguistic codes. The purpose of this exercise is to draw attention to the need of incorporating translating of poetry into the formal translation studies at universities or other institutions dealing with training translators. It also strives to encourage other translators, as well as students and translating instructors to find more poetic works which have been overlooked in the past and which should be translated so that not only the English speakers can revel in their beauty and enchantment.

ANALYSIS OF TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES AND QUALITY OF EDUCATION RUBRIC ON ISLAMIC WEBSITE

Purpose: Website translation requires an advanced translation to make the message transferred comprehensively. The purpose of this research was to analyze the translation quality of the Islamqa.info/id website in Indonesian as the Target Language (TL), translated from its original version in Arabic website, Islamqa.info/ar, as the Source Language (SL).
 Methodology: To discover the quality of translation work, three aspects could be rated: accuracy, acceptance, and readability. The more accurate, acceptable, and readable the translated version is, the easier the text will be understood, according to Mangatur Nababan's theory.
 Main Findings: The type of sentences and translation techniques were considered as the factors that could affect the translation quality. There were four types of sentences and seven techniques used in three articles from the "Education" section on Islamqa.info/id. From the analysis, it was found that the translation quality was scored 1.91 from the scale of 3.00.
 Implications/Applications: The implication of this research for translators, language scientists, researchers, teachers, or students is to make a good quality translation with high accuracy, acceptance, and readability score, a translator should be aware of internal and external aspects of the target language--not the source language only, since this research found that one expression could be commonly used in one language yet strange for other language's use.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: The results of this research could be considered for those who work on a website translation job, from Arabic to Indonesian, in particular. Since Arabic and Indonesian languages are very different from each other in terms of grammatical structure and form of expressions thus, this study has offered useful and practical suggestions for the translation of these languages.

Strategi Menterjemah dan Upaya Pengentasan Probelamatika Penerjemahan Arab di Kalangan Mahasiswa

If someone wants to get a good quality translation, a translator cannot add or reduce the meaning contained in the source language because it is affected by the original form of the target language. Translation is a bridge between the writer of source language text and the target language reader to make the text come naturally appropriate in the target language. This is certainly different when the results of a translation are still too related to the language and culture of the source. The translation will be wrong and rigid. A translator must master the translation strategy, namely: collocation, domestication and technicality. As well as aspects that must be understood, namely: accuracy, readability and acceptability. This can also be a reference for students in finding solutions to problems in translating difficulties, especially for the Arabic Language and Literature students.

CORPUS METHODS AS AN ADVANCED SOLUTION FOR TECHNICAL TRANSLATION QUALITY IMPROVEMENT

This article is devoted to the investigation of the main problems encountered by technical translatorswhile translating engineering texts and provision of an alternative solution for them to eliminate translation weaknesses, improve quality, and optimize translation itself.The article defines features of a good quality translation and its requirements.In addition, the ways to overcome various translation difficulties at syntactic, semantic and structural levels are given in the form of recommended translation techniqueswhich are classifiedaccording to specified criteria.The research paperalso provides a practical example of technical translation, the analysis which gives wide opportunities for studying a corpus as an alternative solution for improving thequality of the translation. The article presents types and criteria for a good corpus compilation. Practical usage of a corpus with examples is suggested to outline its main functions and opportunities which can assist any translator in achieving the closest equivalency and adequate translation. The following paper shares experience of developing the Nuclear Corpus and its successful implementationwhile using the most user-friendly corpus managers. The article also demonstrates the advantages of corpus application during translation compared to other modern technologies used in the process of translation. This research encouragesthe idea of further corpus development for the specific translation needs in order to make target texts equivalent at the highest level and meet expectations of the addressees. At the same time, the article makes it possible to study the issue of a corpus further with the purpose to identify new useful opportunities it can provide to facilitate the work of a translator.

Efficient Phrase Table pruning for Hindi to English machine translation through syntactic and marker-based filtering and hybrid similarity measurement

AbstractFor a given training corpus of parallel sentences, the quality of the output produced by a translation system relies heavily on the underlying similarity measurement criteria. A phrase-based machine translation system derives its output through a generative process using a Phrase Table comprising source and target language phrases. As a consequence, the more effective the Phrase Table is, in terms of its size and the output that may be derived out of it, the better is the expected outcome of the underlying translation system. However, finding the most similar phrase(s) from a given training corpus that can help generate a good quality translation poses a serious challenge. In practice, often there are many parallel phrase entries in a Phrase Table that are either redundant, or do not contribute to the translation results effectively. Identifying these candidate entries and removing them from the Phrase Table will not only reduce the size of the Phrase Table, but should also help in improving the processing speed for generating the translations. The present paper develops a scheme based on syntactic structure and the marker hypothesis (Green 1979, The necessity of syntax markers: two experiments with artificial languages, Journal of Verbal Learning and Behavior) for reducing the size of a Phrase Table, without compromising much on the translation quality of the output, by retaining the non-redundant and meaningful parallel phrases only. The proposed scheme is complemented with an appropriate similarity measurement scheme to achieve maximum efficiency in terms of BLEU scores. Although designed for Hindi to English machine translation, the overall approach is quite general, and is expected to be easily adaptable for other language pairs as well.

Sexual Language Translation: The Perspective of Teaching Polite English

Students of English language can benefit their learning from translating English novels which can be found easily everywhere. Since many of those novels contain sexual languages, students need to be exposed on how to deal with taboo, vulgar and harsh languages. This research investigated how to produce a good and qualified translation of taboo, vulgar and harsh languages from English into Indonesian without creating pornography. The quality examined was its accuracy, acceptability and readability of the translation. The method applied in this research was descriptive qualitative with the strategy of an embedded case study. The source of data was a novel by Sandra Brown and its translation. The research reveals that the students and/or translators should handle taboo, vulgar and harsh languages found in sexual languages by applying generalization, modulation, euphemism, reduction and deletion as the techniques to translate such languages, so they are able to produce a translation which does not violate norms and values. Those techniques have proved to be able to produce a good quality translation.

Quality Translation Enhancement Using Sequence Knowledge and Pruning in Statistical Machine Translation

Machine translation has two important parts, a learning process which followed by a translation process. Unfortunately, most of the translation process requires complex operations and in-depth knowledge of the languages in order to give a good quality translation. This study proposes a better approach, which does not require in-depth knowledge of the linguistic properties of the languages, but it produces a good quality translation. This study evaluated 28 different parameters in IRSTLM language modeling, which resulting 270 millions experiments, and proposes a sequence evaluation mechanism based on a maximum evaluation of each parameter in producing a good quality translation based on NIST and BLEU. The parallel corpus and statistical machine learning for English and Bahasa Indonesia were used in this study. The pruning process, user interface, and the personalization of translation have a very important role in implementing of this machine translation. The result is quite promising. It shows that pruning process increases of the translation process time. The particular sequence knowledge/value parameter in translation process has a better performance than the other method using in-depth linguistic knowledge approaches. All these processes, including the process of parsing from a stand-alone mode to an online mode, are also discussed in detail.

PENERJEMAHAN KATA BUDAYA DALAM LASKAR PELANGI KE DALAM NOVEL BAHASA JEPANG NIJI NO SHOONENTACHI

<p>This research aims to describe the method and technique of the translation of cultural words in “Laskar Pelangi” into a Japanese novel, “Niji no Shoonentachi.” This research uses a descriptive approach with comparative models. Cultural words in this study are determined based on the classification proposed by Newmark’s models. In this research 186 data have been collected according to the two cultural categories, namely, material one and ecological one. The data collection was conducted by comparing Japanese: the target language, and Indonesian: the source language. This comparative analysis of the data uses work tools such as dictionaries, both printed and online. <br />As a result, there are 161 equivalent and 25 not equivalent found out of the 186 data in the translation. The strategy used by the translator consists of literal translation, using general words, cultural substitution, couplet, naturalization from Indonesian, omission, descriptive, naturalization from English and calque. Meanwhile, the language style of the translator tends to follow the language style of the author, trying to bring out the aesthetic value of the source language. Following this tendency and this attitude, the translator of “Laskar Pelangi” has produced the good quality translation</p>

Efficient Search for Equivalents at Your Fingertips – The Specialized Translator’s Dream

The limitations of current terminology tools for specialized translators may, to a large extent, be explained by the complexity of the search process involved in producing good quality translations in specialist domains. This paper introduces a new approach to the development of this kind of resources aimed at satisfying the specific needs of specialized translators. This change of paradigm is reflected in the development of a prototype tool designed for use in legal translation. The tool – for use in English-Spanish translations of technological law in the localization of End User License Agreements – incorporates a revised corpus, comparative law information, and a terminological database. The features and advantages of the terminological database proposed are described in detail. Focusing on the specific needs of translators of this type of texts, comments are included on the acceptability of different terminological options on the basis of comparative legal analysis in different translation scenarios. The incorporation of these comments is a distinctive feature of this new approach to the development of resources and provides a value-added service to translators. The prototype tool designed is intended to serve as a model for the future development of similar applications in any type of specialized translation, in any given field and language combination.

Informative Text Translation Into English to Indonesian

The purpose of this study is to obtain an overall picture of the translation of informative text from English to Indonesian. The translation is then measured in terms of translation.This study used a qualitative approach using content analysis method. Object of this study is informative text from English to Indonesian translated by the fifth semester English students of University of Borobudur. The translation then is analyzed based on four sub-focus, which are equivalence, strategy, errors, and the factors that cause errors in translationIn the translation process that is done by the students found the equivalence translation is widely used by the students, and the translation strategies are also widely used by the students. However, there are also many errors in their translation. So the researchers also analyzed the factors that cause the errors. Therefore, students need to be taught translation learning in order to produce good quality translations. Not only can generate good translation of informative text, but also a variety of other texts

Classification of Machine Translation Outputs Using NB Classifier and SVM for Post-Editing

Machine translation outputs are not correct enough to be used as it is, except for the very simplest translations. They only give the general meaning of a sentence not the exact translation. As Machine Translation (MT) is gaining a position in the whole world, there is a need for estimating the quality of machine translation outputs. Many prominent MT-Researchers are trying to make the MT-System, that produces very good and accurate translations and that also covers maximum language pairs. If good translations out of all translations can be categorized then the time and cost can be saved to a great extent. Now, Good quality translations will be sent for post-editing and rest will be sent for pre-editing or retranslation. In this paper, Kneser Ney smoothing language model is used to calculate the probability of machine translated output. But a translation cannot be said good or bad. Based on its probability score there are many other parameters that effect its quality. The quality of machine translation is made easier to estimate for post-editing by using two different predefined famous algorithms for classification.

Quality Bible Translation in Minority Languages: Can It Be Done?

This article aims to establish that a Bible team translating the Bible in a minority language can have the same level of quality as a translation carried out by a large, well-funded team in a national language. In order to validate this claim, the article first looks at the criteria of a good-quality translation, and then investigates how these criteria are affected by the different contexts in which Bible translation takes place. The final conclusion states what conditions must be met in minority Bible translation projects to achieve good-quality translations.

Songs in British Sources c. 1150–1300 ed. by Helen Deeming (review)

MUSIC FROM MEDIEVAL BRITAINSongs in British Sources c. 1150-1300. Transcribed and edited by Helen Deeming. (Musica Britannica, 95.) London: Stainer and Bell, 2013. [Contents, p. xv-xx; pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. xxi-xxiii; introd. in Eng., p. xxv-xlvi; editorial notes, p. xlvii-lv; acknowledgments, p. lvi; plates, p. lvii-lx; score, p. 3-160; sources, p. 161-62; bibliographical abbrevs., p. 163-64; notes on textual commentary, p. 165-66; textual commentary, p. 167-224; index of first lines, p. 225-*26. Cloth. ISMN 979-0-2202-2366-2; ISBN 978-0-85249-935-1. £95.]The aim of this collection of songs trans- mitted in British manuscripts from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries is to com- pensate for major defect in the history of medieval music of the British Isles. Most of the pieces edited in Helen Deeming's Songs in British Sources c. 1150-1300, monophonic songs in particular, have been so far ne- glected by musicological inquiry, in con- trast with the greater consideration ac- corded to polyphonic music from the same period and provenance. The ambition of this volume, as clearly stated in the preface, is to make a significant contribution to our knowledge of musical activity in Britain be- fore 1300 (p. xxi). The task is essentially accomplished, as the edition provides good quality transcriptions and translations of early British songs that in most cases have remained silent in their sources for cen- turies, and have not been accessible before. The volume comprises three main sections: an introduction with concise descriptions of methodologies, repertory and its sources, and editorial criteria (pp. xxv-lv); the transcriptions and translations of the songs (pp. 3-160); and textual commen- tary with brief discussions on the contents of individual sources, and information on individual pieces (pp. 165-224). In addi- tion, valuable highpoint of this work is certainly the companion online resource in the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (http://www.diamm.ac.uk/resources /sbs/, accessed 27 August 2014) that offers highly defined digital reproductions of the original sources, and in-depth analyses of their musical notations.Admittedly, the edition does not seek to be comprehensive: the term song itself, though rather general, limits the range to music that sets poetry (in English, French, and Latin) with no liturgical destination or context. In addition, Deeming further nar- rows the field to exclude certain categories of compositions, as for instance motets, which are essentially set to liturgical chants and have their own separate tradition. It is worth noting that other omissions include the Later Cambridge Songbook (Cam- bridge, University Library, Ff.1.17) and the thirteenth-century Notre Dame collection Wj (Wolfenbuttel, Herzog-August- Bibliothek, 628 Helmst.): the songs trans- mitted in these sources, as Deeming ex- plains, have already been edited in existing publications (The Later Cambridge Songs: An English Song Collection of the Twelfth Century, ed. John Stevens [Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2004]; Notre Dame and Related Conductas: Opera Omnia, ed. Gordon A. Anderson, 9 vols., Collected Works = Gesamtausgaben, 10 [Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979-88]). The result is an edition of 115 songs (127, when considering contrafacta, which are provided with their own separate transcrip- tions) transmitted in forty-two manuscripts, all of which are miscellanies that include music as later and occasional additions or as fragments reutilized in the bindings of unrelated volumes (pp. xxxi-xxxii). Latin texts represent the majority of the reper- tory, which is almost entirely anonymous. The context of these songs, as Deeming proposes, is probably clerical, since the sub- jects of the poems are mostly devotional or moral, but not explicitly liturgical, with very few secular occurrences, predominantly limited to the French songs (pp. xxv, xxxiii, xxxviii). The corpus edited here is largely monophonic and syllabic, with some pieces for two and three voices, plus six-part song, the famous English canon Sumer is icumen in with its Latin counterpart Perspice Christicola (marked as songs 85a and 85b, respectively; pp. …

Dydaktyka przekładu tekstów specjalistycznych w kontekście rozwoju kompetencji tłumaczeniowej

Translators nowadays are to face challenges, meeting which entails constant broadening of knowledge, familiarizing themselves with new technologies and translation techniques, or acquiring new skills of searching for information. This article addresses the field of translating specialist texts (legal texts in particular) from the point of view of translation teaching. Since the growing demand for translation – and good quality translation, produced by competent translators, in particular – in the globalized world can be observed on a regular basis, the necessity has also emerged to have a closer look at the way translation competence is and can potentially be developed. Existing approaches to competence cover a variety of aspects from the wide spectrum of linguistics, psycholinguistics or cognitive studies; this variety of competence components may result in postulating component models. The awareness of the role of competence and the significance of the didactic process are discussed above, with the focus being placed on the dynamically changing perception of the role of main actors in the teaching/learning process. Having in mind the development of competence seen from the didactic perspective, the following factors should be considered:1. the need to raise the awareness of students as to potential problem areas (i.e. to underline the significance of such extralinguistic concepts as e.g., background knowledge or cognitive factors),2. the need to make students aware of their responsibility for tasks performed as active, not passive, participants of translation interactions,3. changing market requirements and expectations as to skills and qualifications students should have to be highly appreciated and competitive employees.

From A Standard Human Wish

January–February 2012 | 37 detrimental under the Press Scrutiny Board—this was the start of many poets being imprisoned for their work, which still continues to this day). In a positive light, the Khit Por movement allowed for increased translation of key modernist texts. A principal translator of many anthologies over the years is Maung Tha Noe, who has produced Burmese versions of Apollinaire, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” (interestingly , the most translated poem from the West in twentieth-century Burma). Maung Tha Noe’s signature anthology from 1968, In the Shade of a Pine Tree, is a keystone in Burmese literature, and increased access to good quality translations has been essential for Burmese literature to develop the national canvas. As leading poet Khin Aung Aye told me recently, “Translation is a way of climbing our own tree to get at the fruit.” In the 1990s, Khit Por began to suffer from a lack of originality, and a kind of mainstream homogenization of voice was seen to swamp Burmese literary magazines. This ushered in Zeyar Lynn and the latest tectonic shift of “language -oriented” and “postmodern” poetries in Burmese. While Maung Tha Noe has translated major poets to emerge from Khit San and Khit Por (like Aung Cheimt, Maung Chaw Nwe, and Tin Moe—all essential to the Burmese canon), Zeyar Lynn is possibly the finest poet writing in Burmese today and is a key translator in his own right—he’s published Burmese translations of Ashbery, Bernstein, and Szymborska, among others. Zeyar Lynn rejects sentimental poems and focuses more on poetry from the brain, a dramatic change in Burmese poetry and a necessary turning point. His translation work and his own poetry have influenced an exciting new generation of poets (like Moe Way, Pandora, and Maung Yu Py) who are part of a blog-poetry publishing revolution involving a crucial dialogue between the poets in Burma and the Burmese diaspora (which is in itself monumental—poets can finally evade the Press Scrutiny Board and its equivalents). Zeyar Lynn’s administering of Language poetry in Burma is often confused with the term postmodern , and the hybridization or pulling apart of these two delicate strands could yet bring about the next shift in a series of movements that have brought Burmese poetry into the twenty-first century. This could be the most exciting shift of all and unwittingly , perhaps, the political arena is not exempt from influencing change in this case. As poetry has taught us throughout history, in many countries, from the Russian moderns to the “Misty” poets of China, the more inventive poetry is in honoring and transforming tradition—while avoiding the political censor—the more extraordinary it can be. London / October 2011 Tin Moe’s first collection, Hpan-mi-ein (The glass lantern), won a national award. After the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in August 1988, he became an “Intellectual Committee” member of the National League for Democracy. As a result, in 1991 he was held without charge for six months and then confined to four years in the infamous Insein prison. Just before another possible arrest in 1999, he managed to escape Burma after obtaining a passport under his lesser-known real name, U Ba Gyan. He then took political asylum in the United States and died in Los Angeles in 2007, the author of eighteen collections of poetry. from A Standard Human Wish Tin Moe The mumbo-jumbo It’s not for me, I don’t beat Around the proverbial bush In the middle of a magniloquent forest. The right man in the right Place, I am a recluse who Lives deep in the jungle where Trees of knowledge bear fruit. I seek out and query the so-called Righteous paths in each and every book I scour for solutions that might turn My uncertainties into certainties. I don’t measure life’s depth Via a single moment, even in blurred Dreams, I don’t mix hogwash with reality I don’t wallow in the mire like you or go in For poker thrills, I know mind from matter I am no mediocre penpusher With a mu’s worth of letters...

Apertium: a free/open-source platform for rule-based machine translation

Apertium is a free/open-source platform for rule-based machine translation. It is being widely used to build machine translation systems for a variety of language pairs, especially in those cases (mainly with related-language pairs) where shallow transfer suffices to produce good quality translations, although it has also proven useful in assimilation scenarios with more distant pairs involved. This article summarises the Apertium platform: the translation engine, the encoding of linguistic data, and the tools developed around the platform. The present limitations of the platform and the challenges posed for the coming years are also discussed. Finally, evaluation results for some of the most active language pairs are presented. An appendix describes Apertium as a free/open-source project.