Leveraging Terminological Data for Use in Conjunction with Lexicographical Resources

Integration is the operative term in today’s localization (L10N) and translation environments. Translation departments and companies, as well as some individual translators, who have already grown accustomed to using workbench systems that combine translation memory (TM) with terminology management systems (TMS) are rapidly moving on to include an array of L10N utilities and machine translation (MT) in the mix. Furthermore, the evolution of electronic general language lexicographical dictionaries, artificial-intelligence-related ontologies, and other knowledge-based systems promises to add a supplemental dimension to the seamless mix of tools and resources available at the translator’s workstation. Actually, the concept of integration is not new (Melby 1982), but widespread implementation is. In this move from island-like standalone applications (similar to the “islands of automation” seen a decade ago in computer integrated manufacturing), economic concerns and practical requirements have inspired system developers and users alike to seek solutions that will leverage information stored in existing concept-oriented terminological assets designed for use by human translators in order to employ this information in conjunction with lexicographical dictionaries, in particular MT lexica or other word-sense-oriented natural language processing (NLP) resources. Although MT lexica are not the only lexicographical databases involved, this article will generally reference them because market pressures have shifted the focus to these tools.