On-line generation of terminological digests in language translation. An aid in terminology processing

Evaluation of technical and scientific translations dealing with complex subject matter has shown that a) the majority of errors made by the translators involve terminology, and b) the translators spend a great deal of their time searching for the correct equivalents of technical-scientific terms to be translated. This paper describes a technique of generating terminological digests speedily on terminals connected to a computer in order to overcome these impediments and aid the translator in streamlining the translation production process. A terminological digest represents the glossarial framework of a translation, a unique dictionary construted automatically for the text to be translated. The user can produce a terminological digest by invoicing the appropriate program on his terminal, entering on the keyboard the terms he wishes to have looked up. All terms entered are immediately retrieved from an up-to-date scientific-technical dictionary and provided with target language equivalents and other pertinent information. At the user's option, the dictionary entries may be presented singly, as a list in the order of entering the terms (e.g., the order in which they occur in the text to be translated), or as an alphabetically sorted list. These lists may be displayed, typed out, or printed and saved as “minidletionaries” for a particular field.