The Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) offers a desktop program that can be used for searching their database. The TAUS Data Association comprises 45 organizations, including well-known companies as Intel, Dell, eBay, etc. and large language service providers such as Lionbridge and SDL.
One of the the main reasons that brought these companies together to share their large translation memories and glossaries is the improvement of existing machine translation systems. However, the TAUS database represents a very valuable source of bilingual texts in many languages and it is freely searchable (but requires registration) through a Web interface. The widget goes one step further by taking this powerful search tool to the desktop.
Let’s take a look at this “widget”:
Here I ran a simple search for the common term “taskbar”. The results include dozens of human-translated text with the term highlighted in the source (and in the target too, after the system somehow computed its translation by analyzing the words that form the searched term).
The user can make the search more specific (and I think this will vary by language combination) by selecting specific industries (e.g. hardware, software, business services), data owners (e.g. ABBYY, Adobe, Dell, etc.) and content type (instructions, marketing material, software strings, etc.)
The search is fast and accurate and it displays the data in a clear two-column layout. Users can interact with the database by reporting problems with specific segments or sentences (just click on the grey “X” to the right of the segment.)
The widget requires registration, is multi-platform and runs on the Java Runtime Environment.
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Thanks for this information. Unfortunately, TAUS doesn’t have a Japanese to English database; nevertheless, the English to Japanese database works and is a useful reference.
it seems like you’re required to buy a membership in order to use this service. I had signed up (for free) and was able to download the widget but couldn’t get beyond that. Is that how it is or did I not go to the right place?
Hi Ben,
no, the widget is free of charge. You do need to register in order to receive a username and password, which you then need to type into the program the first time you use it. If you launch the program but nothing happens, you may have to reinstall Java on your PC.