TERMINOLOGY DATA BANKS AS A BASIS FOR HIGH-QUALITY TRANSLATION 
Karl - Heinz B rinkmann 
Language Services Dept. 
SIEMENS AG 
Hofmannstr. 51 
D-8000 Munich 
W. Germany 
Abstract 
Currently existing terminology data banks 
serve various purposes. Two major groups, 
i.e. standardization-oriented and translation- 
oriented terminology data banks are of special 
significance. This paper deals exclusively With 
translation-oriented banks and uses as an 
example the TEAM terminology data bank sys- 
tem developed by the Language Services 
Department of SIEMENS. 
Some twelve years ago the Department realized 
that traditional working methods would not be 
effective over the long term in meeting steadily 
mounting demands for high-quality translation. 
These demands result from the fact that human 
knowledge continues to grow at an ever increas- 
ing rate, and that a company such as SIEMENS 
with almost 350, 000 people on its payroll and 
more than 50% of its sales resulting from 
exports has to provide its customers through- 
out the world with high-quality translations of 
its product documentation. 
As extensive tests have shown, fully automatic 
machine translation is incapable of meeting the 
needs of our company and, for that matter, of 
any company or institution having to rely heavi- 
ly on high-quality translation. The correctness 
rates of currently marketed machine transla- 
tion systems are so low as to offset any advan- 
tages in speed that such systems may offer. 
The post-editing effort required to provide 
texts having a correctness rate of 75 or even 
80% with the corrections necessary to reach 
an acceptable standard of quality is unjustifiable 
as far as expenditure of money and manpower 
is concerned. 
We therefore elected to explore the possibili- 
ties of machine support for human translation, 
a path already taken earlier and being taken at 
present by other institutions. The result of 
our effort was the program system known as 
TEAM which is based on a terminology data 
bank which at present contains almost a million 
terminological units, i.e. lexical entries based 
on a defined concept and offering terms express- 
ing this concept in up to eight languages, these 
languages being German, English, French, 
Spanish, Russian, Italian, /~ortuguese, and 
Dutch. The bank is at present being expanded 
to deal with further languages such as Arabic. 
The paper then explains the organization of the 
data bank, the character sets handled, and the 
various aids it offers its users. Particular 
emphasis is given to the support the system 
offers by means of special auxiliary programs 
to terminologists and lexicographers. A detail- 
ed explanation is given of the facilities the 
system provides when used in the inter-active 
mode with respect to information retrieval and 
updating routines. 
A special chapter of the paper is devoted to the 
hard-copy retrieval facilities of the system 
which range from simple lists output via high- 
speed printers having standard or extended 
character sets, to more sophisticated glos- 
saries and dictionaries produced on micro- 
fiches or by way of laser printers, to diction- 
aries and the like in printing-press quality 
produced by data-bank-controlled photo-type- 
setting equipment. The hard-copy retrieval 
facilities also include the possibility of supply- 
ing translators with text-related or text- 
synchronous lists. 
Finally the paper describes the amalgamation 
of the terminology data bank with a text pro- 
cessing system. In this combination the 
translator is shown the text he is to translate 
on a video display in a format that leaves 
sufficient free space for his translation. In 
this space he is shown all target-language 
equivalents which the terminology data bank 
contains for the special-field terms that appear 
in the original text. The translator then com- 
pletes the translation text by using the text 
processing system in the inter-active mode. 
We have found this method faster than the use 
of a machine translation system requiring 
post-editing and even pre-editing in order to 
reach the high quality standard on which we 
have to insist if we want to remain successful 
on the world markets. 
-- 463 .... 
