Reflections on the role and design of online dictionaries for specialised translation

This article is an updated and modified version of a Spanish article published in MonTi 6 (cf. Tarp 2014a). It deals with specialised translation dictionaries. Based on the principles of the function theory, it analyses the different phases and sub-phases of the translation process from a lexicographical perspective and shows that a translation dictionary should be much more than a mere bilingual dictionary if it really pretends to meet its users’ complex needs. Thereafter, it presents a global concept of a translation dictionary which includes various mono- and bilingual components in both language directions. Finally, the article discusses, by means of two concrete online projects, how this concept can be applied on the Internet in order to develop high-quality translation dictionaries with quick access to data that are still more adapted to the needs of each translator.

Phrase-based statistical machine translation: explanation of its processes and statistical models and evaluation of the English to Spanish translations produced

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is an approach to Machine Translation (MT) that uses statistical models whose parameter estimation is based on the analysis of existing human translations (contained in bilingual corpora). From a translation student’s standpoint, this dissertation aims to explain how a phrase-based SMT system works, to determine the role of the statistical models it uses in the translation process and to assess the quality of the translations provided that system is trained with in-domain goodquality corpora. To that end, a phrase-based SMT system based on Moses has been trained and subsequently used for the English to Spanish translation of two texts related in topic to the training data. Finally, the quality of this output texts produced by the system has been assessed through a quantitative evaluation carried out with three different automatic evaluation measures and a qualitative evaluation based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM).