Lee Hogan With the speedy development of the virtual global, the busywork of translation is reduced, allowing more time to explore translation as an art form. Repetitive phrases are inserted robotically, dictionaries are accessed with a mouse, and content precise terminology is cross-referenced to ensure accuracy. The question is, with so many positives, which are the negatives? And is it realistic that a contract translator can compete in the ultra-modern activity market without the assistance of translation software? In the subsequent pages, the blessings and disadvantages of the translation reminiscence program Wordfast, created by using Yves Champollion, may be in comparison with those of the parallel concordancer, Paraconc, especially the loose beta version created through Michael Barlow. The two programs could be examined in many ways, a few very realistic, consisting of usability, performance, and fee effectiveness, and some extra theoretical, including their impact on the translator’s work and language comprehension degree.
Before examining the strengths and weaknesses of Paraconc and Wordfast, I will address the query of necessity. The flow closer to computer-assisted translation gear has been choosing up speed with the appearance of low-cost or loose software. With many translators taking advantage of those gives and increasing their productivity, the ones who’ve no longer taken this step must ask themselves if they may be left behind. AA leaf through online activity postings for freelancers, which leads one to accept that there may be the most paintings for those using translation senescence. Most agencies are more likely to offer a task to someone who can do it in less time and with greater consistency. The stress of using TM won’t affect the freelancers who have mounted direct customers offering regular work and consider only them to do it. The fashionable consensus appears that without these gear, the corporation wor,k wilcorporation’s 1.
The first problem that should be addressed is the construction of the corpus. The most important stage in any production is building a strong foundation. In the case of translation software, this is the construction of the corpus. This starts with locating parallel texts that have already been translated and are available in both the supplied and goal languages. These parallel texts can be hard to find depending on the problem region and the language pair.
Maeve Olohan points out in her book Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies that the Internet offers a few huge sources for building a corpus. Still, while they may be published through international establishments and written by several authors, it can be tough to ascertain which one is the supply text.2. Textsished on the Internet are not necessarily edited or proofread before being made public, the supply texts and their translations must be scrutinized for accuracy. The availability of relevant fabric can pose problems because the characters of texts vary significantly depending on the language pair. Texts translated from Italian to English are usually written better, whereas those from English to Italian are more often of themoreendor ringe.
The subsequent step in constructing the corpus is the alignment of the source and target texts. Precision is vital here; misalignment because of a further paragraph break or punctuation that splits a sentence in the wrong region throws off the whole technique and makes it impossible to match gadgets. The translation memory database depends on correct matching. Due to the inherent traits of the language pair that I painted in, Germanpaintedish, there are common occurrences of misalignment. The fashion of written German frequently includes longer sentences than in English. Because of this, it’s far endorsed in the Paraconc commands that the shorter unit, normally the English version, be merged with the subsequent unit instead of breaking apart the longer, generally German, textual content unit.
Another problem that results in misalignment is abbreviations. German and English do not always have corresponding abbreviated forms. Since an automatic alignment breaks up devices at each complete stop, the English abbreviation ex., for ‘instance’, might spoil off after the whole stop, whereas the German equal, z.B., for ‘zum Beispiel’, might break off twice. Another example that has become a trouble for me is how the date is written. Germans have a full forestall after the day and month, whereas Englishers use shrink to split these. When aligning a big text, this information can upload as much as a massive correction.
Depending on the software program, aligning the texts can take days or hours. Using Paraconc, the translator needs to complete all the steps manually. This is accelerated with Microsoft Word’s “discover and update” tool but is pretty time-ingesting, notwithstanding this. The supply and goal textual content should be divided into devices by putting paragraph marks at the end of each sentence. This is performed by finding and changing each complete forestall, exclamation point, or question mark with the identical mark observed through a paragraph mark.
The trouble is, relying upon the texts being worked with, complete stops can be scattered generously throughout the text, no longer always denoting the end of a sentence. This is, as referred to above, not unusual in German. With this being the case, paragraph marks must be inserted manually rather than routinely. Microsoft Word then numbers every unit, and the text is considered an extended listing of gadgets; our alignment has to be checked and edited. The subsequent steps are to do away with the numbers, spell, take a look at the documents, and shop them as textual content files.
Wordfast, alternatively, has a hard and fast gear called PlusTools that offers a quicker and greater green approach to alignment. Compared to Paraconc, it is a fairly simple and easy manner in which the PC works. After opening Wordfast, several source files can be selected, and the gadgets can be extracted concurrently. After extraction, the translation gadgets are counted and stored; the identification is carried out with the target texts.
Following this, PlusTools is opened, and by clicking on ‘Align’, the source and target texts will be processed, and both aspects will be seen as aspects in two separate files or as one record in desk format. The texts can then be manually changed and verified by using keyboard shortcuts. During the exploration of these shortcuts, I did stumble upon a few problems: Alt M (merge), Alt W (delete cell), and Alt I (insert cell) no longer paintings. Therefore, I used the mouse and the menu bar. The ‘discover and replace’ tool in MS Word can correct repeated misalignment. The documentation that accompanies the PlusTools download gives pointers for the alignment method.