The purpose of this site is to provide a
centralised resource for anyone seeking information about the increasing
relevance of intellectual property and copyright legislation to automated translation tools, particularly
translation memory files and terminological data bases. This is a fairly new
area and at present not a great deal of information is available. The most
interesting sources are set out below, and I intend to add new references and
links as further studies and research come to light.
The relationship between IP, copyright and
automated translator resources was addressed for the first time at an international
event at the “Seminar
on Copyright, Intellectual Property and Translation Tools” held in
The conference papers are available here.
As was highlighted by various speakers, the
essential legislation governing this area is to be found in the WIPO international treaties and EU
legislation governing databases.
·
The February 2008 edition of
The Linguist (official journal of the Chartered Institute of Linguists)
includes an article
by Ross Smith on TM ownership.
·
The question of who owns
translation memories has taken on considerable relevance due to the emergence
of the first web marketplace for licensing TMs, TMMarketplace, whose web site includes
a detailed white
paper explaining their approach to the legal issues surrounding copyright
and aligned web documents.
·
Jeff Allen, a specialist in
machine translation and localisation, has been tracking the opinions of
translation tool users about copyright matters for some years at this page.
·
Another web-based initiative to
ascertain translators' opinions was carried out via a survey edited by Antonio
Valderrábanos, which is available at the Transref web site (run by Atril) under
the title Who owns what? Some Insights on TM Ownership .
·
SDL-Trados, who make the
popular Workbench and TagEditor tools, have included a web seminar called Copyright Protection of Translation Memories
in their events archive. The presentation, by Tracey Byrne, can be consulted here.
·
The issue of copyright in
relation to the compilation
of corpora for use as a translation resource is studied in Translation
Journal by Michael Wilkinson.
·
One of the first specialists to
consider translation
memory ownership from a legal viewpoint was the Spanish Lawyer Jorge Marcos,
whose analysis can be found here
(in Catalan; anyone wanting a Spanish translation can contact me at the email
address below. The main points of his study are covered in my paper at the
If you know of any interesting source which is not
given above or if you have any questions on this area, please contact me at