Computer-Aided Translation Technology: A Practical Introduction

APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY

APPENDIX A Glossary active terminology recognition: A type of automatic dictionary lookup. The terminology-recognition component compares items in the source text against the contents of the term base, and if a match is found, the term record in question is displayed for the translator to consult. Seealso: pre-translation. algorithm: A series of steps that are undertaken to solve a problem. alignment: The process whereby sections of a sourcetext are linked up with their corresponding translations. Alignment can take place at many different levels: text, paragraph, sentence, sub-sentence chunk, or even word. Automatic alignment tools are available to help with this process. alignment "on the fly": The process whereby alignment is carried out during the generation of bilingual concordancesrather than beingcarried out as a separate process (i.e., before the generation of bilingual concordances). anaphoric reference: When a word refers back to a preceding word or group of words (e.g., a pronoun that can be linked to a preceding noun). Seealso: cataphoric reference. annotation: The process of encoding additional linguistic information into a corpus. This information can be syntactic (e.g., part-of-speech tags) or semantic (e.g., distinguishing between different meanings of a 142 Computer-Aided TranslationTechnology word). Syntactic annotation can be done automatically using a special piece of software known as a tagger. Seealso: mark-up. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange): A standard 7-bit character set developed by the American NationalStandards Institute (ANSI) that is used to represent 128 characters which include the Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals, and a selection of other symbols that appear on most keyboards (e.g., ! ? $ % &). ASCII is a commonly recognized character set in a variety of applications because it is verybasic (e.g., it does not allow formatting such as bold oritalics). Although the original ASCII uses 7bits, the common storage unit consists of 8 bits (totalling one byte), which allows 256 characters to be represented. In 8-bit ASCII (also known as extended ASCII), the first 7 bits follow the ANSI standard, but the extra bit is used differently depending on the computer (e.g., in the PC the additional values are used for foreign language and graphics symbols, but in the Macintosh the additional values can be user-defined). batch translation mode: A method of interacting with a translation memory (TM) in which a user runs the complete source text through the system and whenever it finds an exact match, it automatically replaces the new source text segment with the translation that is stored in the TM.Segments for which no match is found in the TM must later be translated by either a human translator or a machine translation system. Seealso: interactive translation mode, pre-translation. bidirectional language: A language such as Arabic or Hebrew that is displayed and read from right to left, but that can also support left-toright display (e.g., for words or names borrowed from left-to-right languages such as English). bilingual comparable corpus: A two-part corpus in which both parts contain texts that have the same communicative function, but one part contains texts originally written in language A while the other contains texts originally written in language B. Because the two collections do not have a source text-target text relationship, they cannot be aligned. See also: monolingual comparable corpus. bilingual concordancer: A type of corpus analysis tool that operates on an aligned parallel corpus by retrieving all the occurrences of a par- Appendices 143 ticular search pattern and its immediate context (usually a segment such as a sentence or paragraph) along with its corresponding translation segments. Seealso: monolingual concordance!. bitext: Seeparallel corpus. Boolean operator: A query limiter such as AND, OR, or NOT that can be incorporated into a search pattern to restrict the list of returned results (e.g., search for all occurrences of "laser" AND "printer"). byte: A common unit of computer storage made up of 8 binary digits (bits). The individual characters of most languages can be stored in a single byte. Seealso: double-byte character set. CAT: See computer-aided translation. cataphoric reference: When a word refers to another word or groupof words that follow (e.g., a demonstrative pronoun such as "this" which can be linked to a noun that comes later in the text). See also: anaphoric reference. character set: A group of unique symbols used for display and printing . Different character sets may be needed...