“Translation Studies in East Asia – Tradition, Transition and Transcendence (2021 East)” was a major conference on Chinese related translation topics recently held in Hong Kong. The conference was organized by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies and The Hong Kong Translation Society. Chilin (HK) founder Dr. Benjamin Tsou was a keynote speaker.
One highlight was the presentation by Jocelyn He of RWS. Her presentation “We need to Talk – RWS Translation Technology Insights Research” reported on a recent global industry survey of freelance, LSP and corporate translators. The full report is available from RWS (with registration) at Translation Technology Insights 2020 (rws.com).
Insights include:
· Demand for services is increasing.
· Increasing numbers of projects and files are creating additional pressure on translators.
Another key insight is that translation software needs to help translators complete projects faster, improve quality and improve efficiency. Use of machine translation is increasing, especially with LSPs.
An interesting insight is that respondents said that Terminology Management was the 2nd most widely used technology after machine translation.
At Chilin, we note that there are two sides to Terminology Management. First, there is the IT system that is used to store, retrieve, and modify terms. This is pure software and is supplied by a tool vendor. Second, there are the actual terms being stored. This is pure content and is normally provided by the user. Building up a comprehensive and efficient database of terms can take years. What is the biggest challenge: The shortcomings of the software or the lack of content?
Chilin’s PatentLex Corpus contains a very large bi-lingual (Chinese-English) collection of over 1 million technical terms. These can be segmented by technical domain. If translators are challenged by a lack of terminology content, Chilin’s PatentLex Corpus may help.
For more information, please contact us at Contact Chilin(HK).
L. Cady @Chilin
