Resource and Workflow Management Support in Teletranslation

Value-added service providers in the technical and business translation market are increasingly organizing themselves into teams whose members work in different locations connected by the Internet or an enterprise-wide intranet. Through this technology it becomes possible to offer a compound service based on the work of translators, revisers, terminologists, a co-ordinator etc., each in a different place. The contribution reports on a project which models the overall workflow from the customer to the service provider and onwards to the professionals involved. It also caters for a variety of automation solutions to be used by the professionals, including terminology databases, translation memories and translator's workbenches as well as machine translation systems. It enables the customer, the service provider and the professionals to manage, share and forward to each other translation-relevant resources such as terminology databases, translation memories and MT parameter sets. The underlying issues of resource and workflow management are discussed. 1 Teletranslation and the Internet Revolution "The Internet has revolutionized professional translation services." Sentences like this are written and read many times when the development and the perspectives of our trade are discussed. One could easily replace professional translation services by the book market or banking or trade and industry at large. The Internet has revolutionized many fields of professional activity. Essentially, the Internet is a means of communication, and as such it serves both the book market, the banking business and many other branches of trade and industry. For translation services, however, communication is not only a means, but at the same time it is the essence of the 1 The Virtueller Übersetzungsdienst R&D project is carried out at the Fachhochschule Flensburg in cooperation with the International Communications Europe GmbH in Rendsburg, Germany, and with funding from the German Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF, Project No. aFuE 1702998). The project team consists of Dorothea Kratz and Lisa Link with the author as project leader. Translating and the Computer 21, ASLIB, London 1999 2 Klaus Schubert: Resource and Workflow Management Support in Teletranslation business. For professional translation services, the Internet revolution has not only drastically changed the ways of communicating, but it has turned the trade's content itself upside down. In a contribution to a previous Translating and the Computer conference (Schubert 1997) I analysed the question what is new about the concept of teletranslation. If the term is understood as in Minako O'Hagan's publications (O'Hagan 1994, 1996: 13), it describes a translation service in which the customer and the service provider establish and maintain their contact by means of telecommunications. If this were all that had changed through the Internet revolution, teletranslation would not differ very much from telebanking or electronic commerce. But in translation, communication is not only an instrument, but the content of the work. Therefore, the revolutionary impact of the Internet technology on teletranslation services goes much further. The main conclusion of my 1997 study was that for an activity to count as new it is not sufficient to substitute the Internet for what was done by fax and express mail before – the really novel characteristics of teletranslation are those workflows and those individual activities within workflows which could not have been realized without the Internet technology. With this conclusion and with the focus on workflows, the scope of the question what is new about teletranslation becomes at the same time much wider and considerably more precise. The Internet revolution is possibly the farthest-reaching and arguably the most visible of the developments the translation trade is undergoing. But it is by no means the only impetus for rapid and continuous change. In recent years, the professional translation service business has seen many developments alongside the coming of the Internet. These include changed requirements on the customers' side: • Customers very often send source texts as computer files which often travel as e-mail attachments. • Customers often send complex source documents rather than plain text files. Such documents may contain tables, graphics, photographs, audio and video sequences and computer programs, and it is understood that the translation should look the same as the original. • A rapidly growing market segment, the software localization industry, requires translated text to be fitted in with program code and translated programs to be tested and validated. • Quality assurance measures increasingly include linguistic issues such as the enforcement of company-specific terminology or compliance with conventions of linguistic style. • More and more often customers require adapting translation, i.e. translation work in which the text is not only translated as exactly as possible from one language into another, but where it is at the same time to be adapted to a different audience or a specific regional variety of the target language or where the source text in defective or non-native language is to translated into high-quality style (cf. Zeumer/Schmidt 1996). As a consequence of these changed demands, many translation agencies long ago transformed themselves into value-added service providers in computer-aided multimedial business and technical communication. And this is not a mere change of labels. The work these service providers do has become increasingly involved with the technical medium of the Translating and the Computer 21, ASLIB, London 1999 Klaus Schubert: Resource and Workflow Management Support in Teletranslation 3 communication, with file formats, lay-out requirements, graphics, hypertext, web sites, on-line documentation, software user interfaces, help text and the like. At the same time, the translation work proper is becoming more and more specialized, so that both translators, revisers and quality assurance managers need very specific knowledge as to the terminology and the technical style of a broad range of domains and the linguistic and cultural conventions of various target countries. Along with the ever-growing time and cost pressure, these requirements bring about a situation in which service providers are compelled to create a working environment where shifting constellations of in-house staff, external staff, subcontractors and free-lance professionals can co-operate fast and smoothly, making use of all available means of automation and software support. Whilst a good deal of the discussion on translators and the Internet focuses on the communication between the customers and the service provider, I report here on a project which is equally interested in the communication in the backoffice, the Virtueller Übersetzungsdienst or Remote-Access Translation Service Project. In this sense, the present contribution is concerned with a special variety of computer-supported co-operative work in the professional translation business. In particular, the objectives of the (on-going) project are the design and a prototypical implementation of a software system to support the management of linguistic resources and the routing of tasks through a network of specialized professionals linked by an intranet or the Internet. 2 Resource Management for the Medium-Sized Service Provider Before looking into the backoffice workflows in section 3, I shall give a brief account of the resources which can be involved in various types of translation assignment I discuss the resources against the background of business and technical translation at large, taking into account both human translation with all applicable computer aids and combined workflows with machine translation and all required human activities needed to make a marketable service out of it.