Internet for Translators Part 1

Internet in translation practice

Lecture outline

1 What is the Internet?

2 Opportunities of the Internet for translators

3 What a translator can find on the Internet

4 Translation resources of the Internet

5 Advantages and disadvantages of the Internet

The Internet and the Translator

• Of all the activities, the profession of translator, perhaps, is the most organically fit into the modern scheme of international communication and information exchange, which is based on the global Internet.
• For a translator, the Internet is, first of all, a unique opportunity to enter the world market. That is, we can say that the concept of distance in its physical sense has ceased to exist for the translator and potential customer.
• Thus, globalization has turned out to be a positive factor for translators, both in terms of the growth of the translation market and in terms of expanding the circle of potential clients. The role of freelance translators in the market has become dominant.

WHAT IS THE INTERNET?

• The Internet is a worldwide system of interconnected computer networks based on a set of Internet protocols. The Internet is also called a network of networks.
• The Internet consists of millions of local and global private, public, academic, business and government networks interconnected using a variety of wired, optical and wireless technologies.
• The Internet provides the physical basis for hosting a vast number of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and e-mail.
• In everyday language, the word Internet is most often used in the sense of the World Wide Web and the information available on it, rather than in the sense of the physical network itself. 

HOW THE INTERNET WORKS

Internet Structure

• The Internet consists of the following main parts:
• 1) the World Wide Web,
• 2) TelNet remote communication system,
• 3) Gopher reference database,
• 4) electronic mail,
• 5) UseNet newsgroups (several thousand electronic bulletin boards), and
• 6) the WAIS indexed database. Of all these Internet components, the World Wide Web, e-mail, and UseNet newsgroups are the most popular among translators.

How to Increase the Efficiency of Search on the Internet

• Whole phrases can be searched by enclosing them in quotation marks. If you enclose keywords in quotation marks, only web pages containing those words in the specified order will be found. If you do not use quotes, all pages with these words will be found, regardless of the order of the words on the page.
• The "~" (tilde) symbol allows you to find synonyms for the word you entered in the search query. For example, the query "~best movies -best" allows you to get links to pages with synonyms of the word "best", but none of them will include this word; use the World Wide Web, e-mail, and UseNet newsgroups.

More about Internet Search

• A minus sign (-) in front of a keyword indicates that the search engine should not search for pages with that term. Using a minus sign allows you to get web pages that do not contain this word. Make sure that there are no spaces between the signs and the keywords (for example, -Bogart, not - Bogart).
• Avoid generic words such as "some", "its" or "this" unless they are contained in the specific title to be found. If such a word is part of what you need to find (for example, a song title), put the whole phrase together with the common word in quotation marks. To find the translation of a word, type the word and translate or translation. To find the definition of a word (term), type the word and define or definition

Internet Search Cntd.

• if you want to search within a specific site, just add the syntax "site:" to the search phrase and then the address of the selected site; the keyword "link:" shows backlinks to the selected site; if you want to know the time in any major city in the world, use the syntax "time" and the name of the city; you can also find out about the weather in the selected city.
• Use the keyword "weather"; Google can also be used as a calculator. Just type a mathematical expression in the search bar and Google will give you the result; the keyword "filetype:" allows you to find on the Internet only files of the selected type; if you want to see how the site looked like in the past or view deleted pages, use the "cached:" operator; in order not to go to Google Translate once again, you can use its "services" directly from the search bar. The syntax is as follows: "translate [word] into [language]". 

Useful Usenet groups

• Two newsgroups with the following addresses are useful for translators:
• 1) sci.lang.translation and
• 2) sci.lang.translation. market.
• The first newsgroup is a forum for translators and other people to discuss professional translation issues, and the second is a marketplace for translation offers and translators.

Internet Services

• Nowadays, the most popular Internet services are:
• Web forums
• BlogsWiki-projects (including Wikipedia)Online
• shopsOnline auctions
• Online events
• Internet time
• E-mail and mailing lists
• Newsgroups (mainly Usenet)
• File sharing networks
• Electronic payment systems
• Internet radio, Internet television, IP-telephony, Messaging systems, FTP servers

USENET NEWSGROUPS

• The most common bulletin board has become USENET. USENET is a worldwide distributed bulletin board system (BBS). INTERNET users all over the world constantly send to newsgroups a variety of messages and during the day these messages via USENET are sent to almost all nodes of the INTERNET for public viewing.
• Now in the Usenet network there are more than 15 thousand newsgroups, which reflect almost all aspects of modern life. In teleconferences you can find documentation on the most modern software, articles of famous scientists, and, finally, anything you want.
• Teleconferences (newsgroups) at one time were called file areas on servers to which everyone who wanted to exchange information on certain topics had access to read and write.

Teleconferences

• Information is disseminated through "closed" teleconferences such as Clarinet. All teleconferences can be moderated (controlled) or unmoderated.
• An example of one of the most serious electronic newspapers available in the INTERNET is the hierarchy of teleconferences Clarinet, which contains more than hundreds of news groups devoted to political, economic, legal, sports and other topics.
• The content of teleconferences is provided by several news agencies, including, for example, Reuters, API, UPI, NewsBytes.

SOME USENET GROUPS

• news.* — Discussion of Usenet itself
• sci.* — Discussion of scientific subjects
• rec.* — Discussion of recreational activities (e.g. games and hobbies)
• soc.* — Socializing and discussion of social issues.
• talk.* — Discussion of contentious issues such as religion and politics.
• misc.* — Miscellaneous discussion—anything which does not fit in the other hierarchies.

​

Internet Functionalities for Translators

• For a professional translator, the Internet opens up extremely diverse opportunities.
• In short, for a translator the Internet is:
• - A repository of electronic dictionaries, encyclopedias, glossaries and various reference materials;
• - A corpus of texts from which you can draw the necessary linguistic information;
• - A source of background information on the subject area of the source text;

Internet Functionalities for Translators

• - This is a repository of specialized translation and linguistic resources;
• - Downloading trial software for translators from manufacturers' websites
• In addition, e-mail and other means of communication facilitate and accelerate the exchange of information with customers and colleagues, making the translator truly independent, and the translation services market - global.
• Finally, the Internet as a new environment for information gives an additional impetus to the development of translation: a whole independent industry has emerged - translation and localization of websites, and this market segment is growing rapidly every year.

Explanatory dictionaries and thesauri

• Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (www.mw.com) - словник і тезаурус
• Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com) - у 20 томах, включаючи обновлен- ниє статті, платний онлайновий доступ ($ 550 на рік)
• American Heritage Dictionary (www.bartleby.com/reference) - словник і тезаурус
• WordWeb (www.netword.demon.co.uk/wweb) - скачуваний тезаурус, заснований на семантичній мережі WordNet Прінстонського ун-ту
• Wordsmyth (www.wordsmyth.net) - незалежний проект онлайнового Інтернет-словника і тезауруса, спонсорований IBM
• Roget's Thesaurus (1911) (http://search.thesaurus.com) - класичний англійський тезаурус [46]
• Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913) (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/for ms_unrest / webster.form.html)
• Le Petit Larousse (http://larousse.compuserve.com/lar ousse / dico.htm) - популярний французький тлумачний словник
• Dictionnaire de 1'Academic Franchise (http://zeus.inalf.cnrs.fr/academie.htm)
• Dictionnaire Universe! de la Francophonie (www.francophonie.hachette-livre.fr) - лексика всіх регіональних варіантів франц. мови
• Meyers Lexicon (www.iicm.edu/meyers) - німецький тлумачний словник
• Garzanti (www.garzanti.it) - італійський тлумачний словник

�Websites of foreign and domestic paper media�

• New York Times www.nytimes.com Le Monde http://tout.lemonde.fr
• Washington Post www.washingtonpost.co Liberation www.liberation.fr
• Los Angeles Times www.latimes.com Le Figaro www.lefigaro.fr [54]
• USA Today www.usatoday.com Time www.time.com
• Newsweek www.newsweek.com Fortune www.fortune.com
• Forbes www.forbes.com
• Business Week www.businessweek.com Wall Street Journal http://public.wsj.com
• People http://people.aol.com Life www.lifemag.com
• The Times www.the-times.co.uk Financial Times www.ft.com
• Economist www.economist.com Daily Telegraph www.telegraph.co.uk
• Independent www.independent.co.uk Nouvel Observateur www.nouvelobs.com
• Le Point www.lepoint.fr L'Express www.lexpress.fr
• Frankfurter Allgemeine www.faz.de Handelsblatt www.handelsblatt.co
• Spiegel www.spiegel.de Stern www.stern.de
• DieZeit www.zeit.de Corriere della Sera www.corriere.it
• El Pais www.elpais.es

Researching for Translation

​

• Learning or checking word usage in the context of a sentence (Glosbe or the whole Internet)
• Looking up meanings and translations of terms (EuDict or the whole Internet)

​

EURODICT

Fiction and Movie Transcripts�

• Bartleby.com (www.bartleby.com) - відмінна колекція художньої та довідкової літератури англійською мовою
• Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg) - величезна колекція англомовних художніх і наукових текстів, включаючи перекази з інших мов (у форматі ASCII txt)
• BookHive (www.bookhive.com) - безліч художніх і нехудожніх текстів, в т.ч. переклади (на англ.)
• Bibliomania (www.bibliomania.com) - великий вибір художньої, довідкової та навчальної літератури (англ.)
• Perseus Project (www.perseus.tufts.edu) - античні автори мовою оригіналу та в англійському перекладі
•   Universal Library (www.ul.cs.cmu.edu) - безліч різноманітних текстів
• Electric Library (www.elibrary.com) - величезна колекція довідкових, наукових, художніх текстів і статей (2000 книг, 150 газет, 700 журналів) з повнотекстових пошуком (доступ платний, $ 10 / міс., $ 60 / рік)
• ODP / Google EText Links (http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Literature/Electronic_Text_Archives) - посилання на електронні бібліотеки та архіви

Fiction and Movie Transcripts - 2

• Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org/reading/books) - каталог посилань на тексти та літературні ресурси
• Books Online (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books) - те ж
• Eserver (http://eserver.org) - художні, публіцистичні, наукові тексти, класичні та сучасні, по 42 темам
• ARTFL (University of Chicago) (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html) - посилання на сайти, присвячені французькій літературі
• Бібліотека Максима Мошкова (www.lib.ru) - відома і велика бібліотека в російській Інтернеті (28000 текстових файлів)
• Новини електронних бібліотек ("Російський журнал") (www.russ.ru/krug/biblio) - великий список бібліотек, нові надходження
• Текстові ресурси Рунета (www.cl.spb.ru/iptill/library) - великий список посилань
• Журнальний зал (InfoArt) (www.infoart.ru/magazine) - російські товсті літературні журнали онлайн
• Рейтинг літературних сайтів Росії http://rating.rinet.ru
• Drew's Script-O-Rama (www.script-o-rama.com) - англомовні кіносценарії [56]

TEXTS CORPORA

• Ready-made monolingual and multilingual corpora of texts available online via the Internet are also of great interest to the translator:
• TIS Corpus (http://tis.consilium.eu.int/isowebtis/welcomeEN.htm) - parallel texts of various EU documents in several (from 2 to 11) languages
• TransSearch (www-ali.iro.umontreal.ca/TransSearch) - bilingual concordancer to the Hansard corpus 1986-93 (transcripts of the Canadian Parliament in English and French)
• Wordtheque (Italian translation by Logos Agency) (www.wordtheque.com) - corpus of fiction and non-fiction texts, 112 languages, 530 million words
• Bank of English / COBUILD (Birmingham Uni / Collins) (http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk) - non-complementary corpus of modern language, 320 million words, online - 56 million, access is paid (JSO / month, 1 300 / year)
• British National Corpus (Oxford University) (http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc) - 100 million. Words of modern language, online access (160 / year) and on CD-ROM (J 220)

�Books and Articles for Translators

• Google Books - scientific books in different languages
• Libraries of books (you can find below - Andriy Parshin. "Theory and practice of translation" (from the personal page of "Freeman's")
• Magazines for translators (free and paid)Catalogs of linguistic programs and resources on the Web.
• World Language Resources. Hundreds of Languages, Thousands of Products

FAMILIARIZATION WITH THE SUBJECT OF THE ST

• Search for similar texts on the Internet in the source and target languages
• Search for videos on the relevant topic (How it works) video in the search results window in the browser
• Search for reference materials in online encyclopedias

�SPECIALIZED SITES AND PORTALS�

• Find Law (www.findlaw.com) - пошук юридичних ресурсів
• Lectric Law Library (www.lectlaw.com) - зразки юридичних документів, довідкові матеріали
• EUR Lex (http://europa.eu.mt/eurlex/en/index.html) - паралельні тексти офіційних документів ЄС на мовах усіх країн-членів
• Legifrance (www.legifrance.gouv.fr) - французький юридичний портал
• International Monetary Fund (www.imf.org) - МВФ
• FreightGate (www.freightgate.com/referenсе) - довідкова інформація по експорту / імпорту та міжнародних перевезень

Translators’ Resources of Internet

• Aquarius (http://aquarius.net) - the oldest translation portal, database of translators and agencies (free registration), news, forums, links; ProZ (www.proz.com) - a fast-growing competitor of Aquarius, still inferior in terms of database size, but superior in terms of user-friendliness and level of organization
• Lantra-L (www.geocities.com/Athens/7110/lantra.htm) - universal translation mailing list, digest, archive (more than 1000 subscribers, more than 100 per day)
• Jobs-Translators (www.egroups.com/group/jobs-translators) - the most popular mailing list dedicated to work for translators, digest, archive (3.500 subscribers, approx. 10 per day)
• Payment Practices (www.macroconsulting.com/payment_practices.htm www.egroups.com/group/ppjiist) - mailing list devoted to the issues of how agencies pay independent translators (which agencies are worth working with, which are not) – Many subscribers, approx. 100 messages per day, digest, archive

Translators’ Resources of Internet - 2

• Translation mailing list on the Egroups server (www.egroups.com/dir/Business/Business_Services/Translation_Services)
• Translatortips (www.translatortips.com) - lots of useful tips, free Tranfree newsletter (approx. 10,000 subscribers), forum [58]
• Translation Journal (http://accurapid.com/journal/index.html) - the best online translation magazine (in English)PointCom (www.geocities.com/Eureka/Office/1936) - translation magazine in French
• Cecilia Falk (www2.sbbs.se/hp/cfalk/indexensecti on Mabercomg.htm) - lots of useful annotated links, especially in the Tools (www.mabercom.com) - lots of annotated links, glossaries and reference materials
• TransHub (http://transhub.cjb.net) - lots of links to translation resources
• Literary Translation (www.literarytranslation.com) - British Council website dedicated to literary translation
• American Translators Association (www.atanet.org) - has a very active section of Slavic languages
• Federation Internationale des traducteurs (www.fit-ift.org)

Linguistic Resources

• The Linguist List (www.emich.edu/~Iinguist) – гарний класифікатор лінгвістичних ресурсів + список розсилки.
• Human Languages ​​Page (www.june29.com/HLP) - безліч посилань на лінгвістичні ресурси
• Index to Linguistics (http://isabase.philol.msu.ru/~jirik/rusling.html) - link Terminology Forum (www.uwasa.fi/comm/termino) - specialized site on terminology Summer Institute of Linguistics (www.sil.org) - database of world languages Ethnologue (+6703 languages from 228 countries, 39.000 dialects and variants of names), scientific works, reference materials
• World Wide Words (www.worldwidewords.org) - excellent site of British linguist and lexicographer Michael Quinion, mailing list (10.000 subscribers)
• ALT.USAGE.ENGLISH FAQ (www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-usage-english-faq) - answers to common questions on the teleconference on English usage - a lot of useful and just interesting
• Індо-європейська база даних (http://indoeuro.bizland.com/index8.html) - довідкова інформація по індоєвропейських мов (як живим, так і мертвим

Practice of Using the Internet by Translators�

•  The most frequent users of the Internet in their professional activities are experienced translators who work with several languages, as well as technical translators - daily or several times a week. Most translators who use the Internet work with English.
• Other common working languages of translators include French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, Lao, Czech, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, etc.30% of translators who use the Internet in their work in the field of scientific and technical translation, 10% - in other fields.

Practice of Using the Internet by Translators - 2

•  Half of the translators who use the Internet in their translation work have been working as translators for more than 10 years (average experience is 10.5 years).
• 92% of translators-users of the Internet use it daily, 8% - 3-4 times a week, 42% use the Internet twice or thrice a days. E-mail is used by all translators-users of the Internet.
• Most translators consider it to be the most useful Internet service, followed by WWW and then newsletters. FTP is used by 27% of translators.
• Most often translators use the Internet to contact colleagues and clients. This is followed by other professionals, friends and acquaintances, and hobbies and fans.

Online Resources for Translators

JOBS FOR TRANSLATORS

• The Internet contains a lot of information about finding translation jobs.
• There are special sites (e.g. www.ProZ.com) where translators are offered to translate a text from different languages for a certain remuneration. Databases of translators on the Internet

HELP FOR TRANSLATORS

• What help can translators get online?
• First of all, help in interpreting and translating terms and idioms, defining concepts, obtaining background information. In addition, news in the field of translation theory and practice and information about new books on translation are useful.
• There are many dictionaries on the Internet (including translated ones, both online and those that can be downloaded to your computer), industry glossaries and terminology databases. Colleagues of translators help them with their work, give professional advice, etc.
• On the Internet you can find translation jobs, useful programs and utilities for translation. Contacts with customers are made via the Internet. Since the Internet is available 24 hours a day, translators access it around the clock. 

USING THE INTERNET AS A LARGE LIBRARY

• A translator can use the Internet as a huge library for obtaining various information. Thus, in order to "read up" on the subject of the text to be translated to familiarize yourself with the relevant field and terminology, you can find relevant texts in the source and target languages.
• For example, if you need to translate a text on AIDS from English into Ukrainian, you can find texts on this topic in English and Ukrainian (sometimes quite similar to the text to be translated), and get acquainted with the topic on the material of Ukrainian texts and learn the relevant terminology in both English and Ukrainian. As a huge reference book.
• As a huge resource of software tools (online dictionaries, terminology databases, translation databases of translator's electronic memory, computer translators, test programs for translators, etc.) 

INTERNET ADVANTAGES

• Thanks to the Internet, translators can exchange translation databases of electronic translator memory on various topics. 
• The Internet contains a lot of information about getting translation work. There are special sites (e.g. www.ProZ.com) where translators are offered to translate a text from various languages for a certain remuneration. 
• There are also various forums where translation problems are discussed (for example, LingvoDa.ru).  Information about various translation conferences is available on the Internet (  To improve their theoretical level, translators can use theoretical and practical electronic translation journals (some paid, some free).
• Free and paid programs and utilities for translators can be found on the Internet.  

INTERNET DEMERITS

• Often search results contain a lot of unnecessary information "garbage". So far, the Internet speed is not always satisfactory, although there are already Internet service providers that guarantee speeds up to 1000 Mb.