Globalization, economic and employment trends, computers, the Internet, and constantly evolving information and communication technologies (ICT) have transformed the workspace and workflow of organizations all over the world. These changes have had a substantial impact on how channels of production and distribution, as well as resources, are managed. While the image of a translator surrounded by books working in solitary seclusion has been the sole image in the public mind for hundreds of years, contemporary reality now dictates otherwise. Comparable to the way in which organizations and businesses (that is to say, a translator`s clients) have been compelled to adjust to changing circumstances, so have translation companies and translators been obliged to adapt their professional procedures to meet diverse client requirements and needs. This is particularly true in terms of technology. By way of simple analogy, much as office suite programs and software deal with the basic demands that arise from office functions and performance, i.e. communication and correspondence, word processing, data collection and retrieval, Web publishing, calculations and presentations, so do a wide range of translation workspace applications --known as Translation Environment Tools (TEnT) or Computer-Assisted Translation tools (CAT)-- correspond to the diverse processes needed to perform translation-specific work. These specialized tools and technologies allow translators to query and retrieve data at the term, collocation and segment levels through terminology databases, concordancers and translation memories. They provide functionalities for translators to create alignments, to consult previously translated content, corpora and parallel documentation, and to handle electronically formatted content while protecting code and tags. They assist translators in maintaining high quality professional work, despite heavy workloads, fast turnaround times and multiple, often complex, file formats.

HT, CAT, MT, MAHT and HAMT are acronyms commonly used in professional translation to refer, respectively, to Human Translation, Computer-Assisted Translation, Machine Translation, Machine-Assisted Human Translation, and Human-Assisted Machine Translation. They reflect diverse scales of intervention by humans or machines along a translation technology continuum bookended at one end by exclusively human translation and at the other end by solely machine translation. MAHT (including CAT or TEnT) refers to the translators` use of computer programs to help them during the translation process, while HAMT refers to the intervention by human translators in machine translated text, for example in post-editing. Over time, translator workstations have gradually transformed into locally networked or online Web "translation workspaces", whereby specialized tools and technologies can be accessed and shared. These tools and technologies can be combined with other small programs and utilities proven to be beneficial to translators, for example, word counters, conversion utilities, and content extraction tools. Whether proprietary, open source or search engine-based like Google, tools and technologies designed for the translation environment continually integrate functionalities from the many contexts they interconnect with: project management, multilingual desktop or website publishing, localization of software, website, games and mobile devices, and automatic (machine) translation. Voice technologies, such as digital dictation and speech recognition, likewise are increasing in popularity.

References:

Baker, Mona and Gabriela Saldanha (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. 2nd Edition, London / New York: Routledge, 2009.

Bowker, Lynne (2002), Computer-Aided Translation Technology. A Practical Introduction, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Esselink, Bert (2000), A Practical Guide to Localization, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.

Gambier, Yves and Luc Van Doorslaer (eds), Handbook of Translation Studies. Vol. 1, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Also online.

Hutchins, John, "The Origins of the Translator's Workstation", in Machine Translation, vol.13, no.4 (1998), p. 287-307. Online.

Ishida, Toru (ed), Culture and Computing. Computing and Communication for Crosscultural Interaction, Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010.

Malmkjær, Kirsten and Kevin Windle (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Quah, C. K. (2006), Translation and Technology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Somers, Harold (ed), Computers and Translation: A Translator's Guide, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2003. Online excerpts.

Zetzsche, Jost, TranslatorsTraining website.