The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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FEATURES The European way What can translators learn from the European Commission's use of technology? By Markus Foti ranslating can be a solitary existence, but nowadays you are never more than a few clicks away from a linguist wrestling with the proper way to render en effet in a given context, or an expert on widgets who also knows English, Italian and Korean. This doesn't mean translators don't gain from face-to-face contact with colleagues; we seek out kindred spirits at conferences and events, and turn to them for assistance when thorny issues arise – as they always do. So it is no surprise that the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) spares no effort in bringing together its 1,750 translators from 24 languages (the 23 official languages plus Croatian) and making sure that the problems each individual has wrestled with – and their solutions – can be found and shared easily. More than 2 million pages were translated by DGT in 2011, so there is a lot to keep track of – not only the translations themselves, but also who is doing them and when. Information technology has been a boon in dealing with the surge in demand for translation. Great effort is put into obtaining the right tools, and in designing custom tools that fit DGT's particular circumstances. On the day I started in the English translation department, in 1999, I was introduced to the work room, where documents awaiting translation were laid out in trays and kept track of with a series of coloured cards on a board. That system had its advantages – but also its limits, in that it only ever applied to one unit. DGT has gone through several document management systems since then. Currently, we use a web-based interface called Translator's Desktop, or Tradesk for short. When T 26 The Linguist JUNE/JULY translators open this in the morning, they can see at a glance not only what ongoing work they have, but also anything else they may have been assigned while they were sleeping. They can find out who is working with them on long or multi-part documents, or check the translations into other languages for ideas on how to deal with difficult passages. Terminology itself is not neglected and the IATE (Inter-Active Terminology for Europe) database is now available to the public at iate.europa.eu.* Another resource that is available to the public is the EUR-Lex portal, which gives access to EU legislation. It is available at eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm and is a crucial resource for translators who regularly quote and paraphrase EU legislation. If you want to check whether there really are EU laws stopping you from selling jam at your church fête (there aren't, by the way), this is the place to look. Tradesk home screen But the main advantage is that Tradesk pulls together the results of various translation aids: document archives, translation memory, machine translation etc. This gives the translator an overview of the amount of recycled material a document contains, which may be nothing at all in the case of a letter from a citizen submitting a complaint, or more than half for ongoing exchanges. In second, third and fourth drafts it may be close to the entire document. So what resources are available? All documents since 1994 (along with a smattering of earlier ones) are stored in a database that can be accessed via the DGTVista application. Editable documents, such as Word and Excel, are searchable, and a parallel view function does its best to line up the relevant sections of documents for terminological searches. The EUR-Lex portal DGT has been a big user of translation memory software from the early days. In the late 1990s, adoption was on an individual basis, and pioneering translators ran Trados Translator's Workbench (TWB) on their local workstations, keeping their own memories. However, that gave no access to what others had done, so people started to share memories, or keep common memories for certain subject areas. A decision was made to find a way to share this work among all DGT translators. Euramis was born. Given that 1,750 translators are producing translations for DGT every day, it is important to let them have access to each other's work as quickly as possible, so an official workflow was set up in 2004. When www.iol.org.uk