This volume is about computers and translation. It is not, however, a Computer Science book, nor does it have much to say about Translation Theory. Rather it is a book for translators and other professional linguists (technical writers, bilingual secretaries, language teachers even), which aims at clarifying, explaining and exemplifying the impact that computers have had and are having on their profession. It is about Machine Translation (MT), but it is also about Computer-Aided (or -Assisted) Translation (CAT), computer-based resources for translators, the past, present and future of translation and the computer. The editor and main contributor, Harold Somers, is Professor of Language Engineering at UMIST (Manchester). With over 25 years’ experience in the field both as a researcher and educator, Somers is editor of one of the field’s premier journals, and has written extensively on the subject, including the field’s most widely quoted textbook on MT, now out of print and somewhat out of date. The current volume aims to provide an accessible yet not overwhelmingly technical book aimed primarily at translators and other users of CAT software.

Table of contents

List of figures ix List of tables xiii List of contributors xv 1. Introduction Harold Somers 1–11 2. The translator’s workstation Harold Somers 13–30 3. Translation memory systems Harold Somers 31–47 4. Terminology tools for translators Lynne Bowker 49–65 5. Localisation and translation Bert Esselink 67–86 6. Translation technologies and minority languages Harold Somers 87–103 7. Corpora and the translator Sara Laviosa 105–117 8. Why translation is difficult for computers Doug Arnold 119–142 9. The relevance of linguistics for machine translation Paul Bennett 143–160 10. Commercial systems: The state of the art W. John Hutchins 161–174 11. Inside commercial machine translation Scott Bennett and Laurie Gerber 175–190 12. Going live on the internet Jin Yang and Elke Lange 191–210 13. How to evaluate machine translation John S. White 211–244 14. Controlled language for authoring and translation Eric Nyberg, Teruko Mitamura and Willem-Olaf Huijsen 245–281 15. Sublanguage Harold Somers 283–295 16. Post-editing Jeffrey Allen 297–317 17. Machine translation in the classroom Harold Somers 319–340 Index 341–349