Dear All,
What resources do you use to help in your translation process when you come across a problem or issue, e.g. a word or phrase, a cultural reference, a document you need to refer to...? Occasionally these may be print resources (a dictionary, thesaurus, the entire 19 volumes of the Biographical Memoirs!), but clearly these days, digital resources are likely to be the main go-to for the busy translator. And this may include online dictionaries, parallel texts, reference works, glossaries, corpora, MT tools, TM, AI...
The Best Practice this week will direct you to Salesian resources you probably cannot do without, and all are available online. Take careful note of them. And let me know if you are aware of any others I have missed.
But I would like to briefly draw your attention to the role that AI can play, and you may be surprised to realise the extent to which it can help if you haven't used it so far; and perhaps even if you have used it, you may not have realised just how much it can achieve in the translation field. Targeted use of AI can make you a ‘smart’ translator. Here are 8 things it can do... and you may like a round number of 10, so could you add two more?
- Obviously it can translate a source text directly (usually in small chunks like a paragraph or two).
- It can generate alternate Target Text options for you (it can make your sentence or sentences more concise on request, offer alternative terminology or phraseology... and you don’t even need to say ‘please’, though a really smart AI will sometimes express its gratitude for that!
- It can help you adjust tone, register, style. Just ask it to do so.
- It will proofread for spelling, grammar, punctuation.
- It can check for consistency of terminology and/or style.
- It can be used to extract terms so you can create or maintain a glossary.
- It can easily generate a text summary.
- It can analyse your source text for subject matter, terminology, or linguistic features that could be a challenge, and this in turn can help you identify a preferred unit of translation (something we will look at in a future newsletter).
- ....
- ....
The really good thing about all of the above is that this is using AI as we would always hope it would be used... to improve our life, and it still allows the translator to intervene, to say things to it like ‘You can do better than that. Try again’ and it will!
best_practice_18-SDB-resources.docx