Bartosz Jarmu

The topic of my MA thesis is Computer Assisted Translation and its main focus is on the contemporary computer programs used in the process of translation. The field is very wide, as the translation software is constantly gaining recognition and acknowledgement not only among professional translators but also ordinary computer users. Although the idea of using machines for the text translation dates back to the early 1980s, only the recent years have brought a major development of this concept. There are several reasons for this fact, first of which is that present-day computers have the sufficient computing power of the processors, that the computers in the past lacked. Second factor is that with the development of globalization and particularly integration between the countries of the European Union, the demand for translations has grown to an unprecedented level. As all the official documents of the European Union are published in each of the twenty three official languages, one can easily notice that it would be impossible to prepare quality translations of such an amount of documents without any automation, just by human translators. The ever-growing demand for translation is the main incentive to developing machine translation software. Contemporary computer tools used in translation can be divided into 3 groups, based on their contribution to the process of translation. There are tools which offer fully automatic translation, without any or with very limited human participation in the process. Examples of such tool would be popular and free Google Translate project, SYSTRAN or METEO System a system of machine translation which was used for twenty years to translate weather forecasts between French and English. Another group would consist of programs used in the Computer Assisted Human Translation. Such programs are applied by the translator during the process of translation, and their tasks are very complex from highlighting particular elements of the text in order to make the document more lucid, to maintaining the structure of the text (tables, diagrams, headings, columns etc. are prepared by the program the translator only translates the text), to functioning as glossary or translation memory (the program finds and recognizes fragments of texts that have already been translated, which proves to be very useful for translators working with many documents of a similar type). An example of such program would be SDL Trados or WordFast. The final group consists of various electronic dictionaries, spellcheckers and text editors. My thesis will focus on presenting and analysing from the point of view of translator and an ordinary user tools mentioned above, in order to touch this new and interesting field of translation theory and practice.