We witnessed the birth of the modern computer between 1943 and 1946; it was not long after that when Warren Weaver wrote his famous memorandum in 1949 suggesting that translation by machine might be possible. Weaver’s dream did not quite come true: while automatic translation went on to work reasonably in some scenarios and to do well for gisting purposes, even today, against the background of the latest promising results delivered by statistical Machine Translation systems such as Google Translate, automatic translation is not good enough for professional translation. There was a pressing need for a new generation of tools to assist and speed up the translation process more reliably and in 1971 Krollman put forward the reuse of existing human translations. In 1979 Arthern went further and proposed the retrieval and reuse not only of identical text fragments (exact matches) but also of similar source sentences and their translations (fuzzy matches). It took another decade before the ideas sketched by Krollman and Arthern were commercialised as a result of the development of various computer-aided translation (cat) tools such as Translation Memory systems in the early 1990s. These e-tools revolutionised the work of translators and the last two decades saw dramatic changes in the translation workflow.

In the 1990s another development established itself as an important trend and has had an increasing impact on the future work of translators and, later, on interpreters. Computers not only made it possible for experts to develop purpose-specific translation tools; they also made it possible to collect and exploit electronic data conveniently. This gave rise to the collection of growing amounts of monolingual, parallel and comparable corpora, which were to emerge as an invaluable resource for translation (and now for interpretation).

We are describing a scenario where the translator (or the interpreter) is the centre of attention. While machines and data in general (and tools and resources in particular) are important assistants in the translation process, it is human users, such as translators, who are the main characters who take the decisions and who decide how and to when to use machines or data. This applies to the case of translation tools that assist the translation process by proposing solutions which can be overridden by translators or to cases where the output of a Machine Translation program is post-edited or analysed by humans. In this scenario the translator and the interpreter, or the human user in general, is the main character. This main character is the focus of the current volume and the editors deserve credit for choosing this scenario.

This volume is a collection of contributions from key players in the field who discuss various aspects related to the tools and resources for translators and interpreters. While the range of tools and resources for translators has been growing in recent years, their counterparts for interpreters are still very scarce and their development is in its infancy. In both cases, however, recent advances have not been sufficiently documented and this volume fills this gap in the literature in a convincing manner. In this volume, the latest tools and resources for translators and interpreters are presented, methodological issues related to the teaching and training are discussed and the needs of translators and interpreters are analysed and reported.

One particular strength of this volume is the balance and complementarity: there are contributions which can serve both scholars and practitioners. In addition, this volume is accessible and comprehensive enough to be of benefit to both categories of readers.

Last but not least, the editors are to be commended not only for attracting these excellent contributions, but also for providing a wider picture and looking not only at the world of technology for translators but also at the hitherto overlooked world of technology for interpreters. In doing so, they pave the way for the research and development that will address the needs of interpreters.

Ruslan Mitkov