<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="E93-1054">
  <Title>Text Alignment in a Tool for Translating Revised Documents</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Making use of previously translated texts is a very appealing idea that can be of considerable practical and economical benefit as a translation aid.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> There are different ways to exploit the potential of &amp;quot;re-translation&amp;quot; with different degrees of generality, complication and ambition. Example-based machine translation is probably the most ambitious end of the spectrum but there can be other points along it. In this paper I describe a simple tool which deals with a particular special case of the &amp;quot;re-translation&amp;quot; problem. It occurs when a new version of a previously translated document needs to be translated. The tool identifies the changes between the two versions of the source language (SL) text and retrieves appropriate sentences from the target language (TL) text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> With that, it creates a bilingual draft which consists of sections in the TL text from the existing translation and update materials from the SL text, thereby reducing the effort required from the translator. This tool could substantially increase the productivity of translators which deal with technical documents of frequently modified products (software-based products are the best example of that). If this is true, it suggests that simple solutions can be very effective in addressing &amp;quot;real-life&amp;quot; translation problems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The paper is structured as follows. The first section discusses some relevant properties of typical texts which are likely to be (re-)translated with this tool. The second section is about the alignment process - I will present a new length-based alignment algorithm, designed for dealing with texts that include additions and deletions. In the following section I will propose a quick procedure to find the differences between two versions of the same document. Then, I will show how the bilingual draft is constructed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The last section will discuss possible continuations of this research which will extend the applicability of the tool to more general translation situations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>