By:Layla Al-Bassam Fahda Al Shaikh

Dina Khaled Al Saud Nouf Al Johany Noura Al Khalaf

1. Academic communities of practice

Academic and research institutions work together internationally and virtually.COP easily becomes part of the virtual world because they have share the same needs.

Definition of academic CoP:According to (Lave and Wagner) the defintion of CoP is:Communities of practice are groups of people who share similar goals and

interests.In pursuit of these goals and interests, they employ common practices, work

withthe same tools and express themselves in a common language. Through suchcommon activity, they come to hold similar beliefs and value systems.

2. Scholarly communication in a wire world

In scholarly communication the essential concentration is on articles and books. With the progress of the internet scientific information becomes accessible to everyone wherever they are in world.

Scientific Information research is shared with others for these reasons:

The work becomes known for everyone. More scientific knowledge that people can use from. To avoid having the exact same research done twice. To let people work together in upcoming research. To spread knowledge in places that are not advanced.

3. Language Barriers

majority of scientific publications are in English.

Some languages are considered dying because the English language is becoming the international language.

4. Position of English as an International Language

countries that publish more translate less.

English the number one language or the international language

5.Role of Translation in Scientific Communication English is the most commonly used language in scientific and

technological publications it does not mean that just because there is non-English text it can be ignored . In an academic world good translations are an absolute necessity ,good human translators are a scarce commodity, particularly in the fields of technical and scientific translation.

6. To MT or not to MT? 6.1. Definitions: Translation memory/(TM) Machine translation (MT) Tele-translation/tele-interpretation Web localization

6.2. The need

The various types of electronic documents require a new kind of literacy called digital literacy

Scholars using electronic material run into language barriers need help, as not all electronically published materials are available in their preferred language. New solutions are being created to meet these demands.

Machine translation combines an intellectual challenge, a worthy motive and a practical objective. The challenge is to produce translations similar to those made

by humans.

6.3. The benefits of MT

MT has the following benefits:

Improved quality Enhanced

Productivity

Portability

FasterCost

reduction

Consistency

Lack of Bias

Availability

6.4. The Problems with MT

MT will rarely satisfy all of the users’ varying

communication needs:

Simple grammatical

errors

Cannot deal with culturally –based

issues

Lack common

sense

Can’t translate texts that go beyond the

expected domain of discourse

Lack of agency

Quality

7. A sample review of available translation software

ATA Software- http://www.atasoft.com (English/Arabic).This software provides an online instant as well as bidirection dictionary (www.almisbar.com) .

G. SL. http://www.dagostini.it/hypertransinfo/hypertransinfo . Its available in 5 different languages.

IBM- www.ibm.com it provides translation from English and back to English, it also provides (TTS) text to speech and also translation of words and phrases. It is designed for travelers. The best it can produce is pidgin English (Iam very forgiving at that).

Language engineering corporation - www.lec.com (multilingual). Logo media is advertised as ( professional translation solution). It provides powerful interactive tools to correct your documents.it provides a user dictionary . Technical dictionary and interactive demo is also available.

7. A sample review of available translation software

Language experts LTD - www.transexp.com (multilingual). It produces the software Neurotran which supports 9 different languages like English Bosnian, German…etc. it doesn’t have an interactive demo.

Systran - http://www.systransoft.com/ (multilingual). The state of art translation software used by the EUC. Its one of the few remaining independent machine translation developers. All systran systems use Systran provides an online translation service on its homepage.

8. what about future?

(MT) may be useful for academic and research organization in the future. (MT) can reduce the amount of work of human translations by taking over translations where accuracy is not essential, and by assisting humans with more important translation jobs. Accuracy in translation is very important that’s why (MT) will never be replaced by human translation.