Iddo,
all you need to do is to put all your documents into a file and
search them with a good concordancer for any terms or strings
you need to dig up. The advantage of this approach is that the
use wildcards and left and right collocate retrieval by sorting
yields flexible access to any terms and variants in your
previous work you might be looking for. In addition, the tedious
work of corpus compilation is practically finished. The chief
disadvantage of this approach is that it allows for monolingual
retrieval only, but judging from your description we are talking
about target language files anyway. There are a number of
concordancers which can be downloaded from the net free of
charge--so that's what you wanted: zero effort, zero costs but
maxium output.
HTH,
Michael Friedbichler
> Dear Corpora readers,
>
> Lend me your ears (eyes?) for a moment as I describe the little
> problem that is bothering my small (but elite) translation team trying
> to come up with a creative solution for terminology management and
> research. Your learned advice would be most highly appreciated.
>
> We are a small translation team doing diverse translation work for our
> company, varying from technical reports to business presentations to
> official letters. The target language is English.
>
> As for the technical conditions, we work on a windows-based local area
> network, sharing a file server and a mail server. Translators produce
> MS Word documents and Powerpoint presentations mostly. Last time I
> checked, there were about 7 gigabytes of such material stored.
>
> We have considered Babylon and Trados products as long-term solutions
> but regrettably, we have neither time nor money (nor management
> backing...) for software acquisition or development at this time.
>
> So, what can we do? For now, being but humble translators, we put up a
> simple MS Access database where we manually jot down useful
> terminology as we go along. But there are still those 7 GB, piles on
> piles of former documents, where I am sure we could find real treasure
> if only we could manipulate it somehow (search? Index? Build a
> concordance?)
>
> Hence, my question to you is twofold:
> 1. How can we collect and organize terminology (barring new software
> acquisition)?
> 2. What can we do to mine into those 7 GB of unexploited previously
> completed work?
>
> Thank you all in advance, awaiting your ideas and suggestions,
>
> I.G.
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