There are many different types of software for translation on the marketplace. Here is a description of some of the most common translation technologies available. You will find that many translation tools, such as SDL Trados Studio, will contain all the types of technology listed below:
Translation memory
A linguistic database that captures your translations (as source and target sentences called ‘translation units’) as you work for future re-use.
Benefits include: Faster translations – never translate the same sentence twice.
Terminology management
A searchable database that stores terms (e.g. product specific terminology) and rules regarding their usage (e.g. gender or description).
Benefits include: Higher translation quality – always use the right word.
Machine translation (also known as automated translation)
Translation carried out by a machine, with no human involvement. These systems can be rules-based or statistical.
Benefits include: Can be integrated into your translation environment (e.g. in SDL Trados Studio) – deliver new content faster.
Software localization
Tools, such as SDL Passolo, help to localize all elements contained in the software, including strings, menus dialogs and icons.
Benefits include: Speeds up many of the technical aspects of software localization – translate new types of content.
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a certain programming language (known as the source language) into another computer language (known as the target language), To be able to transform source code to create an executable program. The name “compiler” is used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to lower level languages. If compiled programs can run on computers whose CPUs or O/Ss are different from the one on which the compiler runs, the compiler is known as a cross compiler. A program that translates from a low-level language to a higher level one is a decompile.
A compiler is likely to perform many or all the following operations:
• lexical analysis
• pre-processing
• parsing
• semantic analysis (Syntax directed translation)
• code generation
• code optimization.
A language rewriter is known as a program that can change the form of expressions without changing the language, while a program that translates between high level languages is usually known as language translator or source translator.