Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: A CAT tool for translation into simple language
Poster: Tony M
Post title: Define "CAT tool"
If you are talking literally about a CAT tool, then it will translate into any language variant you choose — since in essences it is only a system for breaking down the text into chucnk and offering you translation suggestions from its database — that you create. So by translating a succession of documents, you can build up a stock of TMs containing TUs that can be as simplified as you the translator choose...
However, I suspect what you are really talking about is Machine Translation — there, you are in essence doing the same job, except using a vast set of TMs based on TU gleaned in avrious ways from online and other resources. Clearly the algorithms used will determine to what extent "simplification" can take place; one of the snags I can imagine is that it is in the nature of simplified translation that various different source expressions might all have the same translation, which could ba e nightmare for the algorithms to deal with.
Consider a sereis of translations that might all be simplified to "The cat sat on the mat."— e.g. "The mat was sat upon by the cat." / "It was the mat upon which the cat was seated" and so on...
Now in a manual CAT tool, this wouldn't be a problem; but in MY, I can imagine it might cause huge problems with anything other than such a facile example. In particualr, I can imagine that in some fields, "simplification" might end up creating ambiguities that were not there in the source text, or just loss of nuance.
Topic: A CAT tool for translation into simple language
Poster: Tony M
Post title: Define "CAT tool"
If you are talking literally about a CAT tool, then it will translate into any language variant you choose — since in essences it is only a system for breaking down the text into chucnk and offering you translation suggestions from its database — that you create. So by translating a succession of documents, you can build up a stock of TMs containing TUs that can be as simplified as you the translator choose...
However, I suspect what you are really talking about is Machine Translation — there, you are in essence doing the same job, except using a vast set of TMs based on TU gleaned in avrious ways from online and other resources. Clearly the algorithms used will determine to what extent "simplification" can take place; one of the snags I can imagine is that it is in the nature of simplified translation that various different source expressions might all have the same translation, which could ba e nightmare for the algorithms to deal with.
Consider a sereis of translations that might all be simplified to "The cat sat on the mat."— e.g. "The mat was sat upon by the cat." / "It was the mat upon which the cat was seated" and so on...
Now in a manual CAT tool, this wouldn't be a problem; but in MY, I can imagine it might cause huge problems with anything other than such a facile example. In particualr, I can imagine that in some fields, "simplification" might end up creating ambiguities that were not there in the source text, or just loss of nuance.