InterpretBank

Software has become an important part of the language industry. Modern technical writers and translators rely on dedicated software to increase productivity and quality. It is critical to support the adherence to customer-specific corporate language, to be able to reuse already translated text, to guarantee terminology consistency and to perform quality checks. In a globalized world with an increasing demand for translation and interpreting services, the need to rationalize and optimize all language related workflows through computer tools has been particularly strong over the last few years. The benefits of information technology in many sectors are so ubiquitous that its presence often goes unnoticed or is taken for granted.
Yet, conference interpreting does not seem to have been affected by this ra-tionalization imperative nor by recent advances in computer science. Since the English language has established itself as the lingua franca of almost any tech-nological and scientific conference, simultaneous interpreters are generally needed only when the degree of subject specialization is very high. Conference participants expect interpreters to use correct terminology more than in the past. This requires a significant investment in preparation. However, during a busy conference season interpreters may work on a large number of specialized subjects and usually have very little time to prepare for the assignments. Today interpreters make extensive use of the abundance of information offered by the Web. It is reasonable to think that they will have to rely on special tools for information retrieval in the future. The new developments in computer science, natural language processing and corpus linguistics can indeed offer an important contribution to a substantial quality and productivity increase of simultaneous interpreters.
The aim of InterpretBank is to take a step back from this futuristic vision of an "interpreting machine" and to move towards the development of an "interpreter's workstation" in analogy to translator's workstations. Adapting the recent advances of computational linguistics to the needs of conference interpreters and integrating them into an intuitive and easy to use application, the aim of the developed software is to practically support human interpreters during the entire interpreting process, from preparation and interpretation to post-processing activities.