The design of TorreznoTRAD: The semiautomatic Spanish-English writing and translation aid tool

Abstract

The internationalization of the agri-food sector in Spain has led to an ex-ponential increase in writing and translation services from Spanish to English. Inthis socio-economic context, the methodology used to build TorreznoTRAD is de-scribed. TorreznoTRAD is a corpus-based tool that assists in the writing and transla-tion from Spanish to English oftorreznoproduct cards. TorreznoTRAD relies in theresults of exploiting a virtual comparable (Spanish-English) corpus (C-MARMEAT).This corpus was compiled, annotated, and exploited following the protocol proposedby Seghiri (2017) and Ortego Antón (2019). Once C-MARMEAT was compiled, theSpanish subcorpus as well as the English subcorpus were rhetorically tagged withthe help of OpenTagger (Sanjurjo-González & Andaluz–Pinedo, 2021) to determinethe rhetorical structure composed of moves and steps (Biber et al., 2007, p. 23-24).Next, model lines, defined as typical sentences where the content and format arestandard (Pérez Blanco & Izquierdo, 2021), were established and enriched with a bi-lingual Spanish-English terminological database with different categories such as ad-ditives, allergens, nutritional elements, packaging, ingredients, materials, origin, etc.Finally, the semiautomatic writing aid tool was developed to guide Spanish speakersthrough the writing process in English.Thus, it will automatically generatetorreznoproduct cards to satisfy the needs of translators and writers who draft specialisedtexts about this product for the agri-food sector.