Termight: Identifying and Translating Technical Terminology

We propose a semi-automatic tool, ter-might, that helps professional translators and terminologists identify technical terms and their translations. The tool makes use of part-of-speech tagging and word-alignment programs to extract candidate terms and their translations. Although the extraction programs are far from perfect, it isn't too hard for the user to filter out the wheat from the chaff. The extraction algorithms emphasize completeness. Alternative proposals are likely to miss important but infrequent terms/translations. To reduce the burden on the user during the filtering phase, candidates are presented in a convenient order, along with some useful concordance evidence, in an interface that is designed to minimize keystrokes. Ter-might is currently being used by the translators at AT • T Business Translation Services (formerly AT&T Language Line Services). The statistical corpus-based renaissance in computational linguistics has produced a number of interesting technologies, including part-of-speech tagging and bilingual word alignment. Unfortunately, these technologies are still not as widely deployed in practical applications as they might be. Part-of-speech taggers are used in a few applications, such as speech synthesis (Sproat et al., 1992) and question answering (Kupiec, 1993b). Word alignment is newer, found only in a few places al., 1993). We suggest that part of speech tagging and word alignment could have an important role in glossary construction for translation. Glossaries are extremely important for translation. How would Microsoft, or some other software vendor, want the term "Character menu" to be translated in their manuals? Technical terms are difficult for translators because they are generally not as familiar with the subject domain as either the author of the source text or the reader of the target text. In many cases, there may be a number of acceptable translations, but it is important for the sake of consistency to standardize on a single one. It would be unacceptable for a manual to use a variety of synonyms for a particular menu or button. Customarily, translation houses make extensive job-specific glossaries to ensure consistency and cor-rectness of technical terminology for large jobs. A glossary is a list of terms and their translations. 1 We will subdivide the task of constructing a glossary into two subtasks: (1) generating a list of terms, and (2) finding the translation equivalents. The first task will be referred to as the monolingual task and the second as the bilingual task. How should a glossary be constructed? Translation schools teach their students …