DANTERMcentret

The concept of language technology covers many varied tools, all of which aim to make it easier to work with language.

For example, language technology can be a term- and knowledge base, it can be a translation memory system, an electronic dictionary, corpora, concordance programs or a natural language interface.

Term- and knowledge bases

A term- and knowledge base is for knowledge sharing what spreadsheets are for accounts and word processing is for producing texts.

In the term- and knowledge base, all the information is collected in one place, so employees can quickly and easily utilise the shared knowledge in their work. You yourself build up a company-specific technical dictionary, which can hold many different relevant sorts of information, such as examples of usage, multimedia files and links to interesting websites.

The concepts and their use are the starting point for all searches, which means that knowledge sharing develops in parallel with better language usage. The shared knowledge is always available, even if some employees are off sick or leave the company.

The term- and knowledge base can therefore become an important component of external communication, which will become more consistent, professional and convincing.

The DANTERMcentre has experience in developing and working with different termbases, so contact us if you would like more information on the type of termbase that best suits your requirements.

Translation memory

A translation memory is a system that records and stores translated sentences. Every time you translate a new text, both the source and target language versions of the text will be saved in parallel in the translation memory.

The next time you work with a text containing a sentence that is identical – or nearly identical – to one you have translated before, the system will suggest a translation based on your previous translations. The translation process goes more quickly, and the quality improves, when you can spend time on the linguistically difficult tasks and not on trivia.

As well as gradually building up a memory of translations, some systems can be combined with term- and knowledge bases, in which the translator can record and retrieve more detailed information about a company’s special technical terms, and in this way contribute to an improvement in the quality of translations.

Contact the DANTERMcentre to find out how a translation memory may be able to make your working day easier.

Other tools

Machine translation can either be interactive – where the user has to answer questions or choose between options on the way along – or fully automatic. The fully automatic method does not necessarily mean that the translation is complete and correct. It must always be regarded as a raw translation to be edited manually afterwards.

Electronic dictionaries correspond to printed dictionaries, but they additionally offer the user a range of facilities that printed dictionaries do not have, such as searching on a PC, searching for part of a word, copy & paste functions and possibly storing your own words.

A spelling checker is a tool that can catch spelling and typing mistakes, and can suggest to the user alternatives to words that it cannot recognise or generate. Most word processing systems have a spelling checker.

A grammar checker is a tool that checks whether words are combined properly in correct clauses and sentences.

Concordance programs enable you to search for word occurrences, for example in large collections of authentic texts (corpora).

Natural language interfaces enable the user to communicate with the PC in ordinary spoken or written language i.e. without using a special command language.