Corpus Italiano: corpus of contemporary Italian texts from the web

This corpus of contemporary Italian texts from the web was created in the context of the project PAISÀ with the aim to provide a large resource of freely available Italian texts for language learning by studying authentic text materials.

It constitutes a unique language resource for Italian in combining the following features: corpus of web texts (harvested in September/October 2010) composed entirely of freely available and freely distributable texts.

Even though primarily created for language learning, the corpus also provides a rich resource for researchers and translators. The interface will offer different modes for accessing the corpus, ranging from precompiled searches to fully flexible search options for constructing complex queries, aiming to serve different user groups.

For more detailed information, please check: Corpus Italiano

Accademia della Crusca offers an exhaustive list of databases, corpora and historical documents;

Banche dati, corpora e archivi testuali - Treccani

What vitamins can teach you about translation

Words are like vitamins, more effective in their natural context.

Vitamins naturally in food are not crystalline and never isolated. Vitamins found in any real food are chemically and structurally different from those commonly found in ‘natural vitamin’ formulas and are far superior to their synthetic counterparts.

As vitamins, words, taken within their natural context, are more effective and useful.

“Any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation…You didn't break it. It's just in a new position, and that new position can be just as beautiful”

says Erin Mac Kean in an epic TEDTalk. 

In other words, context beyond the words immediately surrounding a term, is definitely relevant.

How can you get maximum benefit from using words in their natural context in a translation project? By using concordances. The added value of using concordances is that they are not as “static” the way dictionary definitions are: concordances analyse different use of a single word, word frequency and phrases or idioms in their natural context.

By using concordances, translators can identify terms in the most appropriate context and easily find the best equivalent terms in the target language.

Terminology loves U(X)

So you just realised that in the same website you found "Login"and "Log in".  Do you hesitate (like me) when choosing between Sign In and Sign Up?

The same button was labeled “Submit” in a page and “Save” in another?  Did you find “New” and  “Create” when uploading new content to your blog?

If “module”, “plugin” or “extension” are used to refer to one same concept, they might raise terminology inconsistencies in UX (User Experience).

Keep It Short and Sweet

The website has to speak the same language as its audience. Technical people tend to think terms like “stack overflow” and “fatal exception” make perfect sense. There should be more attention on how users think about what those buttons and words mean to them.

How to avoid terminology inconsistencies in websites?

• Dear developer, put yourself in the shoes of the person who is accessing the website. You have to be able to use a terminology that can be undestood by the users.
• Check always that your website adopts the technical standards of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) and  the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
• The standard terms and their definitions are given in platform style guides, such as the ones for Windows [Microsoft Corp., 2006], Macintosh [Apple Computer, 2006], and Java [Sun Microsystems, 2001] and the -standard User interface (UI) vocabulary for target platform (Microsoft Language Portal). TAUS Data is also very helpful.

If you (developer) are too busy for dealing with this stuff, don't worry, terminologists do it better! 

Sources:

• UX on your terms
• GUI Bloopers
• Translation is UX manifesto

Microsoft Language Portal

Microsoft Language Portal: a bi-lingual search portal for finding translations of key Microsoft terms and general IT terminology. It is aimed at international users and partners that need to know our terminology for globalization, localization, authoring and general discovery. 

It contains approx. 25,000 defined terms, including English definitions, translated in up to 100 languages as well as the software translations for products like Windows, Office, SQL Server and many more.

Terminology Forum

Terminology Forum is a global non-profit information forum for freely available terminological information online. 

The Forum was established in 1994 and is maintained by Anita Nuopponen with the help of her students at the Dept. of Communication Studies, University of Vaasa, Finland.

You will find here information on terminological activities including terminology work, research and education, on online glossaries and termbanks from different fields as well as general language dictionaries in various languages.

TERMDAT

TERMDAT is an extensive multilingual specialist dictionary, providing a versatile aid for communication, text composition and translation. 

The database is also a means for recording and making available Swiss legal and administrative terminology along with other terminology from the public sector. Terms are available in Switzerland’s four national languages – German, French, Italian and Romansh – and in English.

Source:

TERMDAT

'via Blog this'

ECHA-term: Multilingual Chemical Terminology

ECHA-term is a multilingual chemical terminology database providing the main chemicals terms in 22 EU languages, including pictograms, hazard and precautionary statements.

ECHA-term has been developed by the European Chemical Agency (ECHA) and the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the EU (CdT) (and Intrasoft, my company).

The European Chemical Agency launched a terminology project in 2009 to improve the quality of the translations of its documents and to provide companies with a multilingual terminology tool to facilitate communication in the supply chain.


Go to: ECHA-term

Neologisms in the Digital Age

The Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, with 58.1 million newspaper pages. If only one in 100 of those pages had a neologism on it, it would be an entire other OED. That's 500,000 more words. Not even talking about magazines. Not talking about blogs.
Of course the explosion of social media over the last couple of decades has intensified and accelerated the creation of new words and phrases.

So where will language take us in the future? We just don’t know and it is absolutely impossible for us to guess.

Kerry Maxwell (BuzzWord author @MAcMillan) and Rita Temmerman (professor in applied linguistics (terminology) at Erasmushogeschool Brussels) will try to give us answers to the previous questions.

This will be the topic for the next conference organized by TermCoord (Terminology Coordination of the European Parliament): “Neologisms in the Digital Age”.

Memidex: the moon on a stick?

In recent weeks I have found myself really obsessed with searching for a one stop stop for terminology search and dictionary/thesaurus lookups. 

I acknowledge that we already have a wealth of tools at our disposal and I am simply glad that we have access to all these online research resources which weren't around 20 years ago. Even if the few seconds or minutes required switching from one site to another don't bother us, I’m realizing that what we want is to search a range of resources without visiting individual websites.

So far the tool that better performs this function seems to be Memidex.

Memidex is a free online dictionary and thesaurus with a simple interface, complete inflections, auto-suggest, adult-filtering, frequent updates, a browsable index, support for mobile devices, and millions of external reference links for definitions, audio, and etymology.  

The original Memidex database was derived from the high-quality WordNet® database developed by Princeton University, and used by Google and others.

Memidex provides also several free tools for making dictionary/thesaurus lookups even more faster and simpler.

The downside of this website is that it is available only for English resources. Can’t wait to see one tool like Memidex based on multilingual resources.

New Collins e-dictionary, the way forward

I was reading the article “Dictionaries are not democratic” and I loved it because I completely disagree with J. Green’s view causing me to write this post to reject all his points.

Jonathon Green fails to realise one very important thing: it is the users of language that determine the definitions of words, not lexicographers. Language is fluid, lexicographers just record the up of a point of a term.

Dog-eared dictionaries and old e-dictionaries were not democratic, but the truth is actually the opposite: the internet and search engines enables us to search the corpus for ourselves, to observe any particular word, collocation, or phrase in context, and this is often a better method than the dictionary. 

Moreover, I find it revolutionary, and democratic that people, word lovers like me, are dedicating themselves to recording, forming and promoting neologisms. In the past years, since I opened this blog, I have seen an impressive number of websites and blogs devoted to neologisms. Just take a look to the list on my blog (under Lexistars) and to the Twittersfere.

This said, Collins site is very nicely designed, appealing and cool, I like its crowdsourcing soul and I think it is the way forward for online lexicography and terminology platforms.

In-depht:

• Dictionaries are not democratic 
• CollinsDictionary.com's crowd-sourcing and the shopping lexicon
• Amazeballs to Zhoosh: Collins’ First Fruits
• Omnishambles, smirting and amazeballs: we should embrace new words, even if they are ridiculous

TermWiki Glossary Widget

I wanted to upload a glossary on my blog and I was looking for a nice way to create an appealing, social, and re-usable glossary on my website.. Couldn't find anything so fancy!

Glossaries on websites are usually in the form of simple text. The only thing a user can do is just reading them, which is ok but, I wanted more! 

I thus asked the TermWiki team if there was any solution to create a glossary and embed it on my website or blog. They replied that there wasn't any so far but that they were curious to know more what I exactly wanted. So I sent them my idea with a couple of layouts and they told me that they were willing to develop it!

So this my dream glossary: a Glossary Widget where, apart from checking terms and definitions, I can also share my terms on social networks and gather comments and feedback ( on their platform!)

More in details, TermWiki Widget:

• allows websites to easily embed subject-specific terminology content on their own pages;
• directly embeds glossaries relevant to your website content right from TermWiki’s vast database of existing terms and professionally developed definitions;
• lets visitors obtain key information about important terms without having to visit a separate reference site;
• and last but not least, it raises your website visibility and SEO by including search keywords right on your pages.

How to be a certified Terminology Manager

Striving for improving is for me a healthy way to add value and enjoy what I am doing. That's why I decided to get the ECQA certification in Terminology Management. This certification is a a good investment because it can be regarded as specialised professional qualification.

The course comprises 6 units (5 theoretical units and 1 practical unit based on an exercise).

For every unit participants will receive:

 - A set of materials (to be found in a Moodle-based e-learning platform)

 - An online tutorial (in form of a live webinar)

 - And a discussion forum for questions and answers.

UNIT 1: UNDERSTANDING TERMINOLOGY MANAGEMENT

What is terminology?

Why terminology management?

How terminology work is embedded in my organisation and work environment?

UNIT 2: TERMINOLOGY MANAGEMENT SKILLS

How to search and collect terminology?

How to store and retrieve?

How to coin terms?

How to manage monolingual and multilingual terminology?

How to manage terminology projects?

UNIT 3: TERMINOLOGY STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESS PROCESSES

How to present the business case for terminology?

How to calculate and argue costs & return on investments?

How to involve relevant stakeholders?

How to collaborate with relevant organisational units?

UNIT 4: TEAM WORKING & COMMUNICATION SKILLS

How to organise team communication?

How to manage distributed and diverse teams?

Why conflict management?

How to train and motivate your team?

UNIT 5: APPLICATION SCENARIOS

Preparation for Unit 5 and topics for the participants´ projects

Presentation of the participants projects.

UNIT 6: STANDARDS AND LEGAL ISSUES

Which standards are relevant

How to deal with copyright issues in terminology management

What about product liability

The ECQA Certification in Terminology Management is especially suited for professionals who work as Terminologists, Translators, Localisers and in Technical documentation. Also for freelances, in translation companies, in other commercial enterprises (engineers, ICT specialists, etc.), in universities, NGOs or the standardisation framework.

You can find all information about this at: TermNet.

And this is my certificate! :)

Terminology in legislative procedures

On 28th March, 2011, the seminar 'Terminology in legislative procedures' has been held.

In the hemicycle named after Robert Schuman, one of the founding fathers of the EU, before an audience of translators and EU officials as well as professors and students from some of the leading universities in the EU, different approaches to managing legal terminology have been presented. In the morning session, Isolde Burr of the University of Cologne (Germany) focused on legal terminology and multilingualism from an academic point of view. Antonella Distante – a professor at La Sapienza University of Rome – then mounted the challenge of a possibility of reconciling global and local trends in terminology research. "It's also important" - said Mrs. Distante - "to promote interaction between academic research and the EU institutions". At the same venue Caroline Reichling, head of terminology projects at the European Court of Justice, informed the audience about the progress of her project focusing on a common database of legal terms, regardless of the differences among the legal systems of the EU Member States.

Read also:

• Terminology in legislative procedures



• Big success for the seminar on Terminology in Legislative Procedures!

Free term extractors

Terminology extraction tools or terminology extractors can help suggest possible terms for inclusion in translation glossaries. Term extractors may automatically suggest lists of glossary candidate words and phrases based on a number of factors including repetition, uniqueness, and clustering with other words:

• fivefilters.org


• maui-indexer (downloadable too)


• TerMine (downloadable too)


• AlchemyAPI keyword / terminology extraction


• Terminology Extraction by Translated Labs Free Term Extractors for Download (APIs, Code, and Desktop Versions)


• Wordfast (part of PlusTools 4)


• KEA


• topia.termextract


• Araya Bilingual Term Extraction Tool

Many of these tools, like:

• ExtractKeyword.com

or

• SEOKeywordAnalysis.com

were originally developed to aid in SEO keyword identification or indexing, but they can still be helpful to translators.


Source: globalization-group.com

Read also: Terminology extraction

Glossary of terminology mngmnt

glossary
collection of words that have special meaning in a project

term
word that has a special meaning in a given subject field

termbase
database that contains a collection of words that have special meaning in a given subject field

terminology
collection of words that have special meaning in a given subject field

terminology management
effort to control the usage of words that have special meaning in a given subject field

terminology management system
type of translation software that enables users to efficiently collect, process, and present terminology

validation
process of checking that an entry (or a part thereof) complies with certain established requirements

Source: tcworld.info

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".

TAUS: A new terminology tool from the cloud!

TDA is a super cloud for the global translation industry, helping to improve translation quality, automation and fuel business innovation.


TDA is a non-profit organization providing a neutral and secure platform for sharing language data. Share your translation memories and in return get access to the data of all other members.

Source: TAUS Data Association

Compare with Linguee, a very large corpus of web-based translated materials from live online sources. The data is displayed in-context together with links to the originating sites.

Source: Terminology, Computing and Translation

IATE

IATE (= “Inter-Active Terminology for Europe”) is the EU inter-institutional terminology database.

IATE is a free tool, an online terminological databases, one of the most famous and widely-accessed, which covers a plethora of subject areas.

IATE is the European Union’s terminology base. Any document which has ever been translated at E.U. level, you can find it here. All indexed and ready-prepared for us. The biggest advantage of using IATE, and it’s greatest compliment, is that there is no doubt at all about its professionalism. While in some online forums it is not quite clear where the information comes from, here it comes directly from the E.U. The good: guaranteed professionalism and much information for the translation of legal and technical texts.

IATE has been used in the EU institutions and agencies since summer 2004 for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology.

The project was launched in 1999 with the objective of providing a web-based infrastructure for all EU terminology resources, enhancing the availability and standardisation of the information.

IATE incorporates all of the existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single new, highly interactive and accessible interinstitutional database. IATEcontains approximately 1.4 million multilingual entries.

Source:

• IATE


• OpenSourceforTranslators


• EnglishGermanTranslator

The terminology cloud!

TermWiki.com is a rapidly growing online terminology portal that allows users to search, upload, translate and share terms and definitions with other users around the globe. Peer edits and worldwide collaboration help foster a database of continuously growing and updated terminology, as well as term translations in over 100 languages. TermWiki´s status as one of the Top 10 Wikis worldwide is maintained by continuous advancements in usability and functionality that support the terminology, definition, and glossary development and translation process.

Terminology mngmnt

I definitely agree with the author of "Kilgray Blog":

"An area often forgotten is terminology management. Use of smart technology to manage terminology is in my opinion, the area where the greatest business improvements can be made. There is an initial investment with terminology management but there are real gains to be made by preventing errors in a translated text. It is my opinion that this is where the most efficiency could be achieved."

"The next five years will be interesting but I would advise anyone looking at improving the bottom line by introducing translation technology to makes sure they do not ignore TM and to also look carefully at terminology management."

from:
Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated – Translation Memory