A Platform for the Empirical Analysis of Translation Resources, Tools and their Use

We have developed a software framework that will support experiments to explore the role of translator resources and tools in the performance of translation and translation-related activities. This software environment brings together a wide range of resources and tools within a single work environment that has been instrumented to measure the actions of the translator. In this paper we present an overview of the system that has been developed and describe the kinds of experiments that we intend to conduct. The platform provides detailed logs for most of the actions taken by a translator using the tool suite. We intend to use the data collected from controlled experiments to explore a number of questions, such as how resources and tools effect the productivity and quality of translators depending upon their level of experience, the texts on which they are working, the time constraints imposed on their work, and the mix of resources/tools made available.