The freelance translator’s workstation: an empirical investigation

53 The Freelance Translator's Workstation: an Empirical Investigation Heather Fulford and Joaquín Granell-Zafra Business School, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics, LE11 3TU, UK. E-mail: H.Fulford@lboro.ac.uk and J.Granell-Zafra@lboro.ac.uk Abstract. The notion of a translator's workstation has been widely discussed at various points in the history of translation and computers, and a number of tools and language resources have been proposed for inclusion in it, ranging from general purpose text-editing facilities, to tools designed specifically for translators, such as translation memory and terminology management software. This paper reports on the progress of a project that has been initiated to investigate which of the many available tools and language resources translators today are actually incorporating into their workstations, and which they deem to be useful in supporting their work. Specifically, in this paper, the findings of a survey of UK translators are presented, focussing specifically on the levels of uptake of a wide range of tools and language resources. To date, some 400 responses to this survey have been received, logged and analysed. Perhaps more than other professionals, translators are feeling the long-term changes brought about by the information age. The snowballing acceleration of available information, the increase in intercultural encounters, and the continuing virtualisation of private and business life have resulted in drastic and lasting changes in the way translators work. (Austermühl 2001:1) 1. Introduction The notion of a translator's workstation, comprising a number of computer-based aids to support translators in their work has been widely discussed in the past few decades in the literature of translation and computers (see for example Kay 1980/1997; Melby 1982 and 1992; Hutchins 1998; and Somers 2003). Still other authors have recently provided detailed and comprehensive overviews of the burgeoning array of tools and language resources available to the translator today (see for example Austermühl 2001), ranging from word processing facilities, through dictionary look-up tools, systems for creating and managing terminology collections, to translation memory and machine translation. In addition to these discussions of the computer-based facilities that exist to support translators, a number of studies have been conducted to determine how translators actually work and which of the available tools and language resources they add to their workstations and incorporate into their translation workflow. Some of these surveys, although comprehensive in their coverage of translators' working practices, were undertaken prior to, or in the very early days of, both the 'Internet boom' in the commercial world and the commercial availability of tools such as translation memory (see for example Smith and Tyldesley 1986; Fulford, Höge and Ahmad 1990). Consequently, they can give little indication of the use being made of these facilities by translators, and are thus inevitably now somewhat dated. Still other studies have focused on a narrow range of tools in the translation environment, such as the uptake of machine translation (see for example Brace, Vasconcellos, and Miller 1995), or have been concentrated on tool usage within an individual organisational setting: see for example the review of technology usage at the European Commission (Blatt …

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