230560 Applied Linguistics: Technological Failure or Gaps in Theory: Linguistic Foundations of Translation Assistance Applications (S) (SoSe 2007)

"Die linguistische Grundlage der Übersetzung Unterstützung Anwendungen ist das Thema dieser Kategorie." This is supposed to be the German translation by a machine translation application of the English sentence: "The linguistic foundation of translation assistance applications is the topic of this class." There are some other examples, some completely warping the original, and the question is why this happens, what can be done to avoid these problems, and how assistance tools can be used despite the problems.

In this class we will discuss topics such as structured access to terminology for translators, discussing Terminology Management, have a look at what needs to be done in machine translation systems on the linguistic side, and look at Translation Memory Systems, which are systems used by translators to assist them during industry scale translation. For all of these we will look at the concepts behind, discuss possible uses and problems, and look at existing applications.

At the end of this class the active participant will know different classes of translation assistance applications, useful application contexts, which linguistic areas are applied at which level of assistance, fundamental problems due to the structure of languages, and have and idea of evaluation strategies for assistance applications.

This class will rely on the content of BM 2 and BM 5, so in preparation for this class it is recommended to review especially the areas of morphology, semantics, and lexicography. PM 1 is not required as are computer programming skills; however, testing one or the other application may require work with a computer, the World Wide Web, text processing systems (such as OpenOffice.org Writer, Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word), etc.