The Translator’s Workbench: An Environment for Multi-Lingual Text Processing and Translation

[MT Summit III, Washington, DC, USA, July 1991] The Translator's Workbench: An Environment for Multi-Lingual Text Processing and Translation M. Kugler, G. Heyer, R. Kese, B. von Kleist-Retzow, G. Winkelmann* TA Triumph-Adler AG TA Forschung EF Fuerther Strasse 212 8500 Nuernberg e-mail: marianne@triumph-adler.de Abstract The Translator’s Workbench provides the user with a set of computer-based tools for speeding up the translation process and facilitate multi- lingual text processing and technical writing. The tools include dictionaries, spelling, gram- mar, punctuation and style checkers, text pro- cessing utilities, remote access to a fully auto- matic machine translation system and to termi- nological data bases, an on-line termbank, and a translation memory in an integrated frame- work covering several European languages. 1 Introduction Due to the increase of international contacts, multi- lingual text processing and translation are getting more and more important. While the costs in computer time and memory are very high for fully automatic transla- tion systems and their performance is still a problem, we have decided to develop an integrated package for assis- tance, not replacement of translators. The TRANSLA- TOR'S WORKBENCH, (ESPRIT project 2315) was de- signed to give assistance to professional translators and secretaries, scientists and engineers working in techni- cal fields in performing multi-lingual text processing and handling large volumes of documentation in one or more languages. At several public demonstrations the public interest in an integrated system providing these facilities was very high. The Translator’s Workbench provides the user with an integrated set of computer-based tools for speeding up the translation process and facilitate multi-lingual text processing and technical writing with respect to sophis- ticated language checking and help for developing, re- trieving, and updating terminology. The tools include dictionaries, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style checkers, text processing utilities, remote access to a fully automatic machine translation system and to ter- minological data bases, an on-line termbank and term- bank building tools, and a translation memory in an inte- grated framework covering the languages English, Ger- man, Spanish, and to some extent Greek. Work is in *The work described in this paper is funded by the Euro- pean Community, as ESPRIT project 2315. progress to add the languages French and Italian in or- der to cover the main European languages. 2 State of Implementation After the first two years of the three-year-project, a par- tial prototype of the overall workbench as well as proto- typical realizations of stand-alone modules have been im- plemented based on FrameMaker and X Windows under UNIX on a SUN 3/80 workstation. Work on a MS Win- dows prototype with reduced functionality is in progress. The running prototype integrates a multi-lingual edi- tor, sophisticated language checking facilities, a phrasal translation memory, remote access to the METAL ma- chine translation system and the remote term-bank EU- RODICAUTOM, and an on-line term-bank with ca. 4000 terms on automotive engineering. The user pro- file has been tailored to the user's needs, as they were established by a detailed user requirements study. The interchange of documents …

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