Everything about Bitext totally explained
A
parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations.
Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The
Loeb Classical Library and the
Clay Sanskrit Library are two examples of
dual-language series of texts. Reference
Bibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study;
Origen's
Hexapla (Gr. for "sixfold") placed six versions of the Old Testament side-by-side. Note also the most famous example, the
Rosetta Stone.
Large collections of parallel texts are called
parallel corpora (see
text corpus). Alignments of parallel corpora at sentence level are prerequisite for many areas of
linguistic research.
During translation, sentences can be split, merged, deleted, inserted or reordered by the translator. This makes alignment a non-trivial task.
Bitext
In the field of
translation studies a
bitext is a merged document composed of both source- and target-language versions of a given text.
Bitexts are generated by a piece of software called an
alignment tool, or a
bitext tool, which automatically aligns the original and translated versions of the same text. The tool generally matches these two texts sentence by sentence. A collection of bitexts is called a
bitext database or a
bilingual corpus, and can be consulted with a search tool.
History
The idea of the bitext is attributed to Brian Harris, who first wrote a paper on the concept in 1988, and has been promoted by the
Université de Montréal-based
RALI (
Recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique, or
Applied Research in Computational Linguistics), a group of
computer scientists and
linguists who study
natural language processing.
Pierre Isabelle and
Claude Bédard are noted promoters of the concept of the
bitext.
Bitexts and Translation memories
The concept of the
bitext shows certain similarities with that of the
translation memory. Generally, the most salient difference between a bitext and a translation memory is that a translation memory is a database in which its segments (matched sentences) are stored in a way that's totally unrelated to their original context; the original sentence order is lost. A bitext retains the original sentence order. However, some implementations of translation memory, such as
Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) (a standard
XML format for exchanging translation memories between
CAT programs), allow preserving the original order of sentences.
Bitexts are designed to be consulted by a human
translator, not by a machine. As such, small alignment errors or minor discrepancies that would cause a translation memory to fail are of no importance.
Parallel Corpora in the Web
Further Information
Get more info on 'Bitext'.
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