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<Paper uid="C92-3149">
  <Title>A TRANSLATOR'S WORKSTATION</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Over the last few years, at the Institute for Computational Linguistics in Pisa, an open-ended modular set of tools, known as the PiSystem, has been designed and developed to meet the various requirements of literary and linguistic text processing and analyses. The core component of the system is the DBT, a textual database management and query system that has been implemented in different configurations to perform specific text and dictionary processing tasks. Other components can be integrated with this system kernel as required, depending on the needs of a particular application. (For a detailed description of the DBT in its various configurations see Picchi, 1991.) Within this general framework, in the present paper we describe the construction of a Translator's Workstation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Translators need fast and flexible tools to assist them in the task of rendering an L1 text in L2, as fluently and faithfully as possible.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> They also need tools that are easy-to-use, relatively economic and wherever possible portable, as many translators are free-lancers and much translating work is done at home.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> These requirements have been borne in mind in the design of the Workstation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The Workstation is being constructed around two main components: a bilingual lexical database system and a system that creates and manages bilingual text archives. In addition, procedures are being provided to permit the users to update the basic system archives with their own data. At present, the system languages are Italian and English; however, the procedures are designed to be generalizable: given the necessary lexical components, they could be transported to other pairs of languages. The user can also access monolingual LDBs, and invoke Italian and English morphological programs to query the dictionary and text databases or to check inflectional paradigms.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The entire system is menu-driven; the translator is guided in his use of each component by a set of menus, and context sensitive Helps can be invoked to explain the functionality of each command.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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