TMan - Subsentence - level Replacement , Multilingual Document Generation and Data Conversion

Man is a limited-distribution application and the place it occupies in the activities of the Commission's Translation Service (and other departments) is less clear-cut than is the case for other tools. Indeed, if we were starting from scratch, it is probable that we would not choose to invent an application incorporating such a miscellany of functions and steps are now being taken to remedy this anomaly by migrating the primary mass-use function of TMan (subsentence-level replacement) to a more rational and integrated client-server environment. Nevertheless, the functions covered by TMan are of interest in some respects precisely because they were developed in an ad hoc fashion to meet imperative user needs not covered by other applications or projects, or to take over such functions from applications rendered obsolete by technical developments. TMan has not infrequently been the only means of providing a more-or-less immediate solution to such problems, since it is the only major language support application in the Service to be developed entirely in-house using the principles of Rapid Application Development (albeit in a rather haphazard way). To go into the application's historical development (starting as far back as the late '80s) now would, however, be of little more than academic interest, so this article will simply review the functions now performed by TMan, as well as likely developments. Given the somewhat eclectic nature of the application, this presentation will necessarily be anything but highly structured.