Ken,
How was what your translator friend was asking for different to the
"translation memories" which are available now?
-Rob Freeman
On Monday 16 May 2005 22:39, Ken Litkowski wrote:
> Several years ago, I had several discussions with a translator who
> wanted to be able to identify "phrases" in the source text. He was
> unhappy with terminology and segment-based translation aids. But, he
> went beyond collocations as they have been discussed in the linguistic
> literature to phrases such as "One of the lessons learnt is". He felt
> that in his translating, he frequently stock phrases that he wanted to
> translate the same way, but he had no mechanism for keeping track of
> them, particularly when the phrase was not exact, but rather included
> some variable positions. His idea was that there would be a dictionary
> of these types of phrases (which would include terminological phrases,
> collocations, and whole text segments), where some sort of engine
> (perhaps in Word) would identify and highlight all instances that could
> be handled, leaving only those passages still remaining to be translated.
>
> Ken
>
> TadPiotr wrote:
> > Let me even generalize it a bit: the real problem in translation is with
> > collocations, to which compounds belong. Dictionaries -- and databases --
> > of technical terms focus on lexicalized items, but not on the gray area
> > of collocations. There are very few dictionaries of technical
> > collocations. And that is one of the reasons why translations of
> > technical texts are so "unnatural".
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