Advanced Translation Tools

 

General information

Code: 

7106

Main Scientific area: 

• Computer systems

Regime: 

Half-yearly

ECTS:

5

Teaching type: 

On-site

Language of instruction: 

Portuguese

Course Load

Autonomous work: 

110 hours

Classes: 

30 hours – Theoretical-practical lessons

Objectives of education

Obtain skills on tool, commands and environments related to computer-aided translation. Acquire a set of solid notions about terminology and translation, so that students are able to analyse new problems. Convert simple textual formats through regular expressions. Acquire research experience on corpora according to different purposes.

Key learning outcomes

– Efficiently use a set of tools and concepts related to terminology.
– Efficiently use a set of tools and concepts related to translation based on translation memories.
– Use machine translation for exploratory purposes.
– Use of machine translation as an auxiliary translation step.
– Conversion of simple text formats by using regular expressions.
– Research experience on corpora for different purposes.

Program summary

1. Introduction to corpora and corpus linguistics: use of corpora; construction of parallel corpora.
2. Ontologies, terminology, glossaries, dictionaries.
2.1. Relation between terms or concepts – taxonomic, linguistic, etc.
3. Construction of small ontologies.
3.1. Biblio:Thesaurus, SDLTrados MultiTerm, Stardict.
4. Translation.
4.1. Typology.
4.2. Machine translation: architecture. Exploratory translation; practical experiments.
4.3. Computer-aided translation – architecture and resources.
4.4. CAT subsystems (translation memories; terminology; bitext sentence alignment.
4.5. Experiences with SDL Trados and Google Translator Toolkit.
5. Translation quality assurance.
6. The Internet as a source of information. Research for language studies.
7. Cooperative projects support systems (SVN, wikis).
8. Use of regular expressions and agile adaptation of formats through regular expressions. Global substitutions with reuse of sub-strings.

Essential bibliography

Alcina, A. (2008). Translation technologies scope, tools and resources. Target, 20(1), pp.79-102.

Austermühl, F. (2001), Electronic Tools for Translators. St. Jerome Publishing: Manchester.

Screen, Benjamin (2016). What does translation memory do to translation? The effect of translation memory output on specific aspects of the translation process. Translation and Interpreting 8 (1) , pp. 1-18. 10.12807/ti.108201.2016.a01

SDL Multiterm Online Help. Available at
http://producthelp.sdl.com/SDL_Multiterm_2014/client_en/SDL_Multiterm.htm.

Teaching methods

Theoretical-practical lessons will comprise:
– Presentation of major fundamental content (motivation, concepts, definitions, methods and justifications).
– Completion of specific application assignments on the computer, through a set of specific tools related to computer-assisted translation and terminology.
– Complementary readings.

Assessment methods

Assessment included both theoretical and practical components.
The grade from the theoretical component will be obtained through one individual written assignment.
The practical component involves two projects and one presentation during the course’s workshop.