Online Translation

This chapter concerns key aspects related to online translation, and focuses on the relationship between translators and the web. The ‘Introduction’ section o ers an overview of the rst internet-based communication channels used by the early online communities of language and translation professionals, and charts their subsequent evolution. The section on ‘The ecosystem of online translation’ presents a range of web-based resources for translators, including online (meta-)dictionaries, glossaries, terminology databases and shared translation memories, highlighting their key features. The following part covers online translation tools and internetbased translation environments, such as browser-based applications that support translation projects from start to nish, allowing the deployment of communal or proprietary translation memories and glossaries, as well as the integration of online machine translation (MT) for subsequent post-editing to boost productivity. The chapter continues with a description of the key features of the most popular online translation marketplaces, given their growing importance in creating business opportunities for translators. Finally, the section on ‘Online translation in the Web 2.0’ is devoted to the latest developments of user-generated translation in the Web 2.0 scenario, and reviews high-pro le online collaborative translation projects as well as crowdsourcing e orts. This leads to an assessment of the translation crowdsourcing model, in which volunteer (amateur) translators are involved in projects for the localization of popular social media platforms of which they are themselves users. Each section discusses representative examples of relevant websites, online tools, web resources, internet-based projects or services, with a bias towards those available in English, which are analyzed from the perspective of translators. While the inclusion or exclusion of items from the various categories does not imply any endorsement or criticism, or any implicit judgment of their quality, an attempt is made to identify common trends and interesting speci c features that have played a role in the development of online translation, discussing their pros and cons.