Evolution of Computer Terminology Translations with the SPOT Dictionary

Jiri Hynek, Premek Brada

Department of Computer Science & EngineeringFaculty of Applied SciencesUniversity of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic

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“On the quality of Czech translations of technical literature”

Apply filters Zažádej o filtry Ask for filters

Why the ICT translator’s work is hard What we can do to help alleviate it

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Standard translation process Translation, localization projects (books,

software) (up to) millions of words in various contexts team work (export, import, corpus sync) need for consistency, efficiency, quality

dictionaries, corpora, CAT tools

Problems a translator runs into grasp meaning of highly specialized terms be aware of already existing term translations

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Making term translations

Linguist, corpus, current dictionaries Months, years of preparatory work

and polishing Published dictionary

ICT context: process works well for “stable old-timers” like memory, disk, dialog window

But what if new words appear every month, and get accepted worldwide within weeks?

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Troublemakers among words Old-timers Novas and supernovas Homonyms, synonyms Shifting sands Esoteric terms

… appear in books, papers, blogs, student works (diploma theses), documentation, software applications meet us daily

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Troublemakers (1) Synonyms (pull-down | drop-down) Common words in new meaning

Problems acceptance in non-original languages alternative translations – which is correct?

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Troublemakers (2) Supernovas, esoteric terms – spam,

phishing, blog, code closure, social bookmarking, refactoring, proxy, locale, box model, marshal, bean-managed persistence

Problems “explanatory translations” instead of terms narrow community users prefer original to translation

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Ways out

Translate only few books? Educate translators? Educate developers, L10N specialists?

… or …

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SPOT

Dictionary of (evolving, current, unsettled) ICT terminology translations

Goal = reconcile two forces terminology from users quality of resulting language

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Collective wisdom approach Community to create term translations Fruitful cooperation of linguists,

knowledgeable users, translators, and professionals (engineers, academics) complementary skills, contexts, knowledge

cf. COBUILD approach to capture language “as is” rather than “as should be”

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Key community supporting features

Dictionary searching browsing (letter,

category, project, status)

links Communication

comments voting

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Key professional support features

Editorial board translation quality

Translation projects isolation communication geographic distribution

Live term contexts Google search several context categories

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SPOT as corpus building tool

Translation settling process user adds term user adds translation (with notes) registered users comment, vote editor decides

correct vs deprecated translations

Projects developing local corpus in isolation publishing for general availability

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SPOT as dictionary and CAT Dictionary with added value

good/bad translations, comments, explanations context

… as compared to FOLDOC; slovnik.zcu.cz

On-line CAT tool corpus sharing and updating, discussion draw from already existing translations

… as compared to Google, reference.com, dictionary of math terminology, TU Brno

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Conclusion

ICT translations challenging even for skilled professionals

SPOT: let translations become a shared work of the ICT “general public”

Thank you