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Maria Cristina Toledo Báez 2010. El resumen automático como recurso documental  para  la  traducción  de  artículos  de  investigación  del  ámbito  jurídico-tecnológico (español-inglés-francés) . Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 311 pages. ISBN: 978-3-631-60360-4

Research and information retrieval competence (CEN 2006) are proved to be indispensable skills for a professional translator. Owing to the overwhelming quantity of information encountered nowadays in the Internet, this competence makes it possible to compile more reliable information in less time, manage and retrieve information more effi  ciently and, consequently, enhance the translator's fi  nal results. Also, translation technologies are seen as helpful tools to carry out successful translations and, in combination to the research competence, this skill is considered essential for a translator in the current professional market.

In this book, the author provides an overview of major work in translation technologies, namely corpus-based and corpus-driven translation, machine translation, information retrieval, and more specially  human and automatic text summarization, and sketches their impact on the human translation of specialized texts. Although she outlines all these technologies in her fi  rst chapter, in the remainder of the book the author focuses her attention on automatic summarization and the advantages that bring to translation. In this vein, her main hypothesis aims to prove that term-based summarization constitutes a useful documentation and terminology resource for semi-professional translators.

Throughout the paper, the author shows how to carry out cutting-edge high-quality research that confi  rms her initial hypothesis by means of qualitative and quantitative results. She manages to demonstrate that automatic summarization enhances specialized translation in three languages (Spanish, English and French) in both direct and inverse combinations, albeit with better results for direct translation. To do so, she employs an empirical methodology based on a trilingual (Spanish, English and French) comparable corpus as the main tool of the study and the Term-Based Summariser (TBS), developed by the research group in computational linguistics from the University of Wolverhampton (United Kingdom).

The book is structured in fi  ve chapters and offers a linear scientifi  c approach that ultimately reveals positive results with respect to the usage of automatic summarization in translation. The fi  rst three chapters are dedicated to introducing the main cornerstones of the book, i.e. translation technologies (chapter I), text summarization, both manual and automatic (chapter II), and translation assessment (chapter III), and offer general and specifi  c information about each topic. These chapters constitute the background of the research and serve as an introduction and an update to the use of translation technologies and translation assessment. It is also worth highlighting that the author proposes an assessment template combining both analytic and holistic evaluation to carry out the translation evaluations in the following chapter.

In turn, the next two chapters are devoted to the presentation of the empirical study and the results obtained. In Chapter IV, the author describes the starting hypothesis and the main objectives, together with the methodology and techniques used in the study. She also provides information about the participants and the materials employed during the empirical study, the methodology followed and the implementation. Chapter V is dedicated to the evaluation of the translations produced by the participants in the empirical study presented in the previous chapter. The author provides an exhaustive description of the methodology carried out to test these translations, either produced with or without the TBS, and give examples of direct and inverse translation excerpts. In this chapter, she applies the assessment template developed in Chapter 2 and, thus, bases her objective evaluations on quantitative and qualitative criteria.

The last chapter is devoted to the conclusions. Here the author presents a concise summary of all the main ideas appearing in the work and presents possible future research that can be derived from this study. As the main part of this section, she interprets the obtained results and concludes that a term-based automatic summarization should be part of an innovative translator's workbench.

As fi  nal remarks, it is worth highlighting the innovative combination of Computational Linguistics and Translation Studies in this study, in the form of automatic summarization systems and specialized translation. This contribution makes this research a pioneer work in the translation fi  eld.  Besides, the good results obtained by the author in her empirical study prove that automatic summarization is an interesting and innovative translation technology and, as such, opens new lines of research in the future.

## References

European Committee for Standarisation (CEN) 2006: European Standard. Translation Services - Service Requirements . EN-15038. Brussels.

Isabel Durán Muñoz