ASSIST

Description

Translators have access to a wealth of information during the process of translating a text. This includes monolingual dictionaries to examine the senses in the source and target languages, and bilingual dictionaries to examine lexical equivalence. Less available is a translation (or parallel) corpus which provides examples of how translation equivalents are used in the target language. The recent research focus has been on providing translation equivalents for technical vocabulary in a restricted domain. The problem we addressed is that of providing contextual examples of translation equivalents for words from the general lexicon.

For a sentence in the source language (English or Russian) the tool suggests examples of similar contexts in the target language selected from the target language corpus and provide an interface for creating and maintaining a user dictionary of contextualised translation equivalents. The reason we concentrate on the general lexicon is because of the variety of meanings and possible translations that are exhibited by words from the general lexicon, but are not usually covered by translation equivalence lists given in bilingual dictionaries.