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Discusses the vital role of technical translation services in the process of information dissemination and technology transfer with particular reference to India. Argues that, for the most effective provision of translation services, subject specialists should be available in special libraries and documentation centres. Gives suggestions for improving translation services in India.

I could quote many more examples of linguistic difficulties facing the managers, research workers, salesmen and other staff for whom we provide a service. You are all familiar with the problem. Some of you cope with it using the resources at your disposal, sometimes scanty, sometimes considerable. Others would like to help their colleagues but are deterred, and I can almost hear them say ‘Am I taking on more than I can cope with? How do I set about it? Can I do it at a time when my budget is limited and it is a struggle to maintain services and standards, let alone embark upon a new venture?’

Systran, the European Commission's multilingual machine translation system, is a fast service which is available to all Commission officials. The computer cannot match the skills of the professional translator, who must continue to be responsible for all texts which are legally binding or which are for publication. But machine translation can deal, in a matter of minutes, with short‐lived documents, designed, say, for information or preparatory work, and which are required urgently. It can also give a broad view of a paper in an unfamiliar language, so that an official can decide how much, if any, of it needs to go to translators. In this way, much time can be saved for a translation service which is already facing a relentless increase in the volume of its work and which will have to cope with the new languages of an enlarged European Union. We have set up a post‐editing service to correct machine texts for users who cannot do this in their own departments. Raw machine translation is only one of a number of multilingual services now being made available. The switch to personal computers throughout the Commission, and the greater use of increasingly reliable electronic mail, also means that other forms of help can be given. First, a bridge has been created between Systran and Celex (the multilingual data base containing Community legislation). Secondly, and only in recent months, Eurodicautom (the Commission's multilingual terminology data bank) has been incorporated in the Systran dictionaries. With this link, it will be easy to look up technical terms in a given language and have them returned in one or more other languages. A survey has shown how officials use Systran and has enabled us to identify their needs. In all these ways, Systran is making excellent progress as a means of rapid communication between the many departments of a multilingual Commission. Our aim is to enhance the quality of Systran, to broaden its application to the languages of the Community and to explain and vigorously promote its use.

This article reports the outcomes of a study on communication support, commissioned to develop a borough‐wide strategy in 2003 by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.The research stems from a recognition of communication as a key to successful delivery of public services and enhancement of a multicultural community.The focus is on ‘communication’ (rather than ‘language’), since it captures issues beyond the exchange of information through words: interpersonal interactions and relationships, techniques and modes of organising information exchange. Language is a key component within the broad ambit of communication mechanism and skills. Hence interpretation and translation are perceived as models of communications support alongside advocacy, integrated team, multilingual professional team, family/friends and minors, supported language, symbols and signs, and Plain English.While engaging in the debate and highlighting some of the broader issues concerning communication support services, the focus is on the following main issues:• policy frameworks and guiding principles in communication support• methods and techniques for needs assessment, monitoring and evaluation of communication support• communication support provision in Tower Hamlets including quantifying need, actual state of provision and users' perceptions.Probably among the first of its kind, the strategy draws on existing knowledge and good practice to develop a common framework for public services in Tower Hamlets. It is believed that it will serve a pioneering role in co‐ordinated existing and developing coherent approaches to communication support.

Many scientists encounter foreign‐language publications whose subjects are of particular relevance to them. Their problem then lies in finding whether a translation is available and if not, where linguistic help may be found. The most useful sources of information about translations have been surveyed with particular emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses, and with examples pertinent to the metals industry. It has been demonstrated that very little effort is required to be 95 per cent certain of the availability, or otherwise, of a translation of a particular paper.

The publications of the BLLD, including several new ones, are listed and briefly described.

Mr Patrick in his paper has called for a liberal policy on the part of companies in making translations available; J shall now describe one method of combining liberality with enlightened self‐interest. Since I believe the BISITS to be the first successful one of its kind, I shall describe how it was formed and developed as well as how it works today.

This paper aims to describe a study of the queries generated from a user experiment for cross‐language information retrieval (CLIR) from a historic image archive.

A controlled lab‐based user study was carried out using a prototype Italian‐English image retrieval system. Participants were asked to carry out searches for 16 images provided to them, a known‐item search task. Italian speaking users generated 618 queries for a set of known‐item search tasks. User's interactions with the system were recorded and queries were analysed manually quantitatively and qualitatively. The queries generated by user's interaction with the system were analysed and the results used to suggest recommendations for the future development of cross‐language retrieval systems for digital image libraries.

Results highlight the diversity in requests for similar visual content and the weaknesses of machine translation for query translation. Through the manual translation of queries the authors show the benefits of using high‐quality translation resources. The results show the individual characteristics of users while performing known‐item searches and the overlap obtained between query terms and structured image captions, highlighting the use of user's search terms for objects within the foreground of an image.

This research looks in depth into one case of interaction and one image repository. Despite this limitation, the discussed results are likely to be valid across other languages and image repositories.

To develop effective systems requires studying user's search behaviours, particularly in digital image libraries.

The growing quantity of digital visual material in digital libraries offers the potential to apply techniques from CLIR to provide cross‐language information access services. The value of this paper is in the provision of empirical evidence to support recommendations for effective cross‐language image retrieval system design.

The recent report for the Commission of the European Communities on current multilingual activities in the field of scientific and technical information and the 1977 conference on the same theme both included substantial sections on operational and experimental machine translation systems, and in its Plan of action the Commission announced its intention to introduce an operational machine translation system into its departments and to support research projects on machine translation. This revival of interest in machine translation may well have surprised many who have tended in recent years to dismiss it as one of the ‘great failures’ of scientific research. What has changed? What grounds are there now for optimism about machine translation? Or is it still a ‘utopian dream’ ? The aim of this review is to give a general picture of present activities which may help readers to reach their own conclusions. After a sketch of the historical background and general aims (section I), it describes operational and experimental machine translation systems of recent years (section II), it continues with descriptions of interactive (man‐machine) systems and machine‐assisted translation (section III), (and it concludes with a general survey of present problems and future possibilities section IV).

Since every community of practice generates, seeks, retrieves and uses information resources and sources related to the cognitive structure being researched or studied and the tasks being performed, the need arises to undertake studies focused on real user communities, which in the case of this paper is the group of translators. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

In this arena of application, it is important to remember that translators are not only information users, but also information processors and producers. Thus, their documentary competence has to evolve in three dimensions: the informational, the methodological and the strategic. The conceptual model proposed in the paper is based on information literacy (INFOLIT) standards and also the authors' knowledge of translation practice and the competencies it demands, where INFOLIT plays a starring role. This paper is part of a broader research currently in progress, whose main goal is to provide translators and interpreters with a solid instruction in information literacy.

The paper introduces a model for information literacy specifically intended to develop the information competence of this community of users, it reveals that the model is a gathering of skills, competences, knowledge and values, and it is based on the cooperation between the authors' expert knowledge of information science and professional translation practice.

This paper puts forward the first proposal for information literacy applied to translation training.