Mission

Our mission is to make real-world translation data easily and freely accessible to the global translation community. TransBank is therefore conceived as a general-purpose repository that equally caters for the needs of all translation stakeholders, be it translation researchers, translation trainers or trainees, freelance translators or developers of translation technology.

To unleash its full potential, TransBank needs to be fed with authentic translations. The more language pairs, text types, subject domains, translation modalities, text production settings and translator profiles it covers, the more useful it gets for the community and everyone involved. Therefore we encourage you to join the TransBank network and to contribute your translations to the database.

Reasons

There are many good reasons to contribute to TransBank:

  • TransBank is where academia meets the industry.
    The free availability of and user-friendly accessibility to real-world translation data may help to bridge the gap between translation theory and practice.
  • Your data help others.
    Your translations are an invaluable resource for others, for example for students who learn from professional translations, for researchers who develop translation quality metrics or for translation trainers in search of recurrent errors in groups of students in order to improve teaching.
  • Other people’s data help you.
    Being an open and growing repository, TransBank allows you to harness translations produced by others, for example to enrich your own translation memory, to investigate your research questions or to analyse authentic translations with your students in your translation course.
  • We enrich your data for free.
    For all translations that you provide you will receive manually checked sentence-level aligned and metadata-enriched data, free of cost, which you can then ingest into your CAT systems to boost the productivity and quality of your future work.
  • Ensure sustainability and recycling of your data.
    After production, many translations remain unused on hard disks, gathering dust and cobwebs. With the help of TransBank this otherwise neglected data may be reused in the most varying ways and thus be given a new, sustainable purpose.
  • Together, we can advance scientific progress.
    Modern data analysis techniques are capable of extending our understanding of complex phenomena such as human language on an unprecedented scale. But without access to authentic translations this is a wasted opportunity. Just like sharing genomic patient data helped to cure many diseases, sharing translation data may help to solve a wide range of translation-related problems. Your translations are perhaps the key researchers have been missing to test their hypotheses or validate their models.
  • Because translation technology matters.
    Translation has irreversibly become a form of human-machine interaction – whether one likes it or not. Instead of fearing that machines will entirely replace human translators, we should care about improving the technology in our translation toolbox. Needles to say that translation data is the key to improve state-of-the-art translation technology.
  • Be part of the innovation!
    The era of data has come, and neither the craft of translation nor the scientific inquiry into translation is an exception. Data-driven methodologies are becoming the state of the art in academia and industry alike. The choice is ours – do we want to get swept away by the data wave or do we want to ride it?
  • Improve the level of future translators.
    Authentic translations, both felicitous and less felicitous ones, are arguably the best resource for education and training. So why not share one’s own translations to help present and future generations to master the craft of translation, eventually raising the level of professionalism of the language industry as a whole?
  • It’s easy.
    The process of providing data will be made as simple as possible through an intuitive web interface where you can upload texts and basic information about the selected texts.
  • It’s secure.
    The terms of use for providing and downloading TransBank data will be carefully drafted by legal experts in the field of language data. This is to avoid infringements of intellectual property rights and misuse of personal or confidential data. Apart from that, data providers will have various anonymization options to hide translators’ identities.
  • It’s free.
    TransBank subscribes to the open science idea and therefore makes all data available free of cost. It is a means to strengthen data-driven methodologies in translation by leveraging valuable data that would otherwise remain unused.
  • Small contribution = big impact.
    Sharing translation data does not only mean giving away your data but first and foremost using others’ data for your purposes. The bigger TransBank grows, the more data will be available to everyone involved. Even if you make only a small contribution you will help to make TransBank bigger and more diverse, which, in turn, makes the resource more useful and attractive for every single user.
  • We are not stealing your data.
    In our data-hungry world, we constantly give away information about us and our activities. Oftentimes, we are not even aware who is collecting and sharing our data. TransBank on the other hand lets you make a conscious decision to contribute your translations for a meaningful purpose while leaving full control about what you share to you.
  • Still not convinced?
    Then try out the simulation of the future TransBank search interface in order to explore how powerful it will be for the compilation of tailored corpora on demand!
    • Join!

    If you are interested in joining the TransBank network and contributing your translations to the database, please complete the below form. Anyone can join and any kind of translation is of great value to TransBank!