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Information Technology for Translation

Objectives

This course is a practical training course to enable students to become familiar with the principled use of new information and communication technologies in the area of translation. Additionally, the course seeks to enable students to work autonomously in this area and plant seeds for future project or thesis work in Translation Studies and New Technologies.

Upon successful conclusion of the course students will be able to:

1) Use more advanced word processing features related to translation.
2) Evaluate the possibilities and limitations of Machine Translation.

3) Apply more advanced online searching techniques related to translation and cultural resources
4) Critically evaluate translation resources available online
5) Become familiar with the basic principles of Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools, including translation memories, terminological databases and linguistic corpora, segmentation, etc.
6) Apply those principles using Trados and memoQ

General characterization

Code

722160002

Credits

6.0

Responsible teacher

Marco António Franco Neves

Hours

Weekly - 3

Total - 168

Teaching language

Portuguese

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of information and communication technologies.

Bibliography

1) (2012) European Commission, Translation Tools and Workflow. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
2) Kay, M. (1980). The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation. Palo Alto: Xerox Parc Working Paper.
3) Kubler, N. & Aston, G. (2010). “Using corpora in translation”. A. O’Keeffe and M. McCarthy (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London /New York: Routledge, pp. 501-515.
4) SDL Trados Studio 2014. Getting started for translators (2014). SDL: Maidenhead.
5) Steinberger, Ralf, Bruno Pouliquen, Anna Widiger, Camelia Ignat, Tomaž Erjavec, Dan Tufis and Dániel Varga (2006). \"The JRC-Acquis: A Multilingual Aligned Parallel Corpus with 20+ Languages\". Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC´2000). Genoa, 24-26, pp. 2142-2147.

Teaching method

The classes take place in a computer room. They include short demonstrations by the teacher to show software functions, or demonstrations where students also carry out the steps being shown. At other times students will practice the software with the help of the teacher. Question and answer sessions will then clear up any doubts regarding the software function(s) being considered. Academic articles will be supplied and students will also consult websites.

Evaluation method

Evaluation Method - An oral exam at the computer to evaluate the software competence acquired by the students during the course (70%), The production of a written assignment about one of the subjects of the course(30%)

Subject matter

1.Introduction to the use of information and communications technology within translation.
2.Advanced word processing functions and Internet searching applied to translation.
3.Online resources facilitating translation.
4.Translation memories: basic principles, creation of translation memories, alignment of translations, import and export of memories, computer assisted translation.
5. Use of memoQ and Trados.
6.Main principles of corpora and use of public corpora in translation practice.
7. Use of machine translation.