THE MACHINE TRANSLATION JOURNAL
SPECIAL ISSUE ON NEW TOOLS FOR HUMAN TRANSLATORS
Editor: Sergei Nirenburg
Guest editors: Kenneth W. Church (AT&T Bell Labs) and Pierre Isabelle (CITI)
The Machine Translation journal is inviting submissions for a Special
Issue on the theme of translation support tools.
Fifteen years ago, in his seminal paper "The Proper Place of Men and
Machines in Language Translation," Martin Kay argued forcefully for
what was then a radical new view of Machine Translation (MT), and has
since become known as the "workstation approach" or the "tools
approach." In contrast with fully-automatic MT and largely-automatic
approaches such as Machine Assisted Translation (MAT) followed by
post-editing, Kay advocated the more modest goal of building machines
capable of SUPPORTING HUMAN TRANSLATORS in ways that conform to THEIR
OWN NORMAL WORK PROCESSES. The machine would only be called upon to
execute those portions of these processes that can be automated
reliably. As our understanding of human translation progresses, the
assistance will extend deeper and deeper towards its core aspects.
The obvious starting point for this programme was to provide
translators with customized office automation systems: multilingual
word processing, on-line dictionaries and term banks, text archiving
and retrieval facilities, etc. But beyond that, where can we go? Short
of full MT, what more can we do for translators?
Some promising concepts have been discussed in recent literature, such as:
* automated terminology extraction and management
* translation memories (including bilingual concordancing systems)
* translation checkers
* translation dictation systems
Systems based on some of these concepts have even begun to appear on
the market.
We are inviting high-quality, original research papers relevant to this
topic of novel tools for translators, including but by no means
limited to the four areas mentioned above.
DEADLINE: February 29, 1996.
FORMAT: Please send hardcopy or electronic file (plain text or
PostScript) to either guest editor.
JOURNAL SUBSCRIPTION: Please contact Kluwer Academic Publishers Group,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands; or P.O. Box 358,
Accord Station, Hingham, MA 02018-0358, USA.
GUEST EDITORS:
Kenneth Ward Church Pierre Isabelle
AT&T Bell Labs CITI
office 2B-421 1575 Chomedey Blvd.
600 Mountain Av. Laval, Quebec
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 Canada H7V 2X2
U.S.A. e-mail: isabelle@citi.doc.ca
e-mail: kwc@research.att.com fax: (514) 973-5757
fax: (908) 582-7550