Language Tools at the EC Translation Service: The Theory and the Practice

Language technology brings new tools to the translator's desktop: full-text retrieval systems, terminology systems, translation memories and machine translation. European Commission's Translation Service, SdTVista is used for full-text search of reference documents, the powerful aligner in Euramis creates translation memories which are stored in a central Linguistic Resources Database, sentences not found in the memory are automatically sent to the EC Systran machine translation system, and relevant terminology is retrieved in batch mode from the Eurodicautom termbase. The resulting resources are brought together on the Translator's Workbench 2 . These tools are being used extensively today by about one third of SdT translators. While it would be premature to cite global statistics, there are strong indications that substantial gains in productivity can be achieved. The 1996 machine translation survey, the experience of the Translation Workshop between 1996 and 1998, and the 1998 translation memory tools survey confirm this. The crucial factor is the assimilation of translation technology in the workflow of a large organisation — and this constitutes a real challenge for management.