Management of terminology in a machine-translation environment

The input and organization of terms play a central role in a dictionary-based translation system. The quality of the output text depends, for the most part, on the development of the dictionary. However, a lexical database cannot solve all problems of ambiguity. Moreover, it cannot take into account the effective usage of terms in specialized texts. This paper describes how terminology management is carried out in a machine-translation environment. We list a series of problems posteditors have to cope with and offer partial solutions to these problems. The material is based on work done in a translation firm where all translators are required to postedit machine translations.