Modern language experts at the University of Leeds are developing computer programs which could alter how languages are taught and used around the world.

Dr Serge Sharoff of the Centre for Translation Studies is working on three research projects – Kelly, TTC and Accurat – to bring things up to date. He has been awarded close to £700,000 from the European Commission in recent months to fund the work.

TTC (Terminology Extraction, Translation Tools and Comparable Corpora) aims to provide new tools for translators by producing up-to-date term lists from original texts in French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Russian for rapidly developing areas, such as wind energy or mobile phones. This will be done by taking a variety of different methods utilising a large amount of original texts in these languages. Such term banks can be used for translation, including, including machine translation – using computer software to translate speech or text from one language to another – and computer-assisted translation tools – translators using computers to assist in their work – with multilingual content management tools.

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