Computational Linguistics in the Translator’s Workflow—Combining Authoring Tools and Translation Memory Systems

In Technical Documentation, Authoring Tools are used to maintain a consistent text quality—especially with regard to the often followed translation of the original documents into several languages using a Translation Memory System. Hitherto these tools have often been used separately one after the other. Additionally Authoring tools often have no linguistic intelligence and thus the quality level of the automated checks is very poor. In this paper I will describe the integration of a linguistically intelligent Authoring Tool into a Translation Memory System, thereby combining linguistic intelligence with the advantages of both systems in a single environment. The system allows you not only the use of common authoring aids (spell, grammar and style checker) in source and target language—by using a single environment the terminology database of the Translation Memory System can be used by the authoring aid to control terminology both in the source and target document. Moreover, the linguistically intelligent Authoring Tool enables automatic extraction of term candidates from existing documents directly to the terminology database of the Translation Memory System.