Terminology extraction

Both translators and translation agencies need to invest time in terminology management one way or another.

Translators will usually make use of ad hoc terminology research and sometimes also of systematic terminology management in order to specialize in certain subject fields: it is necessary to use and manage terminology consistently.

Good terminology management requires efficient and correct terminology extraction (or term extraction) techniques. This is useful in order to avoid spending precious time on searching for terms and their equivalents and to avoid terminological inconsistency. For preparing a translation project and previously providing a term list, one can do a monolingual term extraction using various tools. Unfortunately, automated term extraction both mono- and bilingual rarely yields to satisfying results. The existing term extractors (you can find a short list here or here) are either too expensive or useless… or both!!

Luckily, there are some cheap or even free tools which can help translators or companies in analyzing and processing texts and making term lists for major projects semi-automatically.

Three of such tools are:

• Apsic Xbenc: ApSIC Xbench provides simple and powerful Quality Assurance and Terminology Management in a single package. Just load files in any of the dozens of CAT formats supported and get your translation quality to the next level.


• WebCorp: WebCorp is a suite of tools which allows access to the World Wide Web as a corpus - a large collection of texts from which facts about the language can be extracted.


• AntConc: A freeware concordance program for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux.

p.s. It'a pity that Attila Gorog gave up blogging, this post is sample fromfrom his interesting blog "Terminology, computing and translation".