Term of the Week: Augmented Translation

Why does a technical communicator need to know this?

Augmented translation gives translators access to various technologies in a unified environment. The central component is adaptive machine translation that learns from translators in real time. It extends translators’ capabilities by reusing their own work more efficiently and lets them focus on new and difficult content.

In addition, augmented translation combines the following:

• terminology identification and disambiguation that links to authoritative references with information and translations.
• automated content enrichment (ACE) that provides links to related resources, such as court decisions in a legal translation.
• translation memory that supports both machine translation and traditional methodologies.
• project management that automatically coordinates activities and shares information between all parties.

As of 2017, no environment incorporates all of these elements, but the individual components are becoming increasingly common, and some platforms already include some of them. As augmented translation technology evolves, it will make translators more efficient, productive, and valuable[DePalma 2017][Lommel 2017].