CyTerm Actors

Author: Chris Turner, www.cycom.co.uk

Actors

The Original Source Author

The Original Source Author has a critically important role to play in the document engineering process. The source author is the highest authority on the subject
message that he intends to convey to the readers and of what concepts he intends to convey when he uses a particular term, phrase, or sentence structure. His
understanding of what is meant by a term or sentence might not be shared by others. When composing the source document he should ensure that every term and
sentence that he uses is unambiguously mapped to a concept or concepts stored in a terminology databank. If he finds a term is not in the termbank he shall provide
an entry and a definition. If he finds that a term maps to several different concepts in the termbank he shall mark-up his document to mark which concept he intends.
If he finds that a sentence can be interpreted ambiguously he shall rewrite the sentence resolving the ambiguity or provide a mark-up resolving the ambiguity.

If the Original Source Author cannot be persuaded to fulfil all these tasks, then a proxy for the original source author must be found. The Author Proxy will be a
subject specialist and be monolingual. He will be capable of unambiguously decoding all the writing of the Original Source Author.

The Original Source Author (or his Proxy) will always be an instance of a Target Subject Specialist but a may be a degenerate monolingual instance.
 

The Target Subject Specialist

The Target Subject Specialist knows the terms used for his specialist subject in his native (target) language. He is substantially a monolingual but may be able to read
sufficiently well in a foreign source language to be able to recognise a concept when it has been verbosely defined in that foreign source language. Note that he does
not need to recognise specialist terms in the source language, nor does he need to be able to decode complex specialist language constructs in the source language.
His role is to contribute terms and definitions of the term to the termbank for his specialism and native language. He may work reactively by being notified of new
concepts that have been added to the termbank for which there is no term that has yet been entered in his language.

The Translator

The Translator is bilingual and can read and understand texts in the source language and can accurately express the text in the target (native) language for a range of
specialist subjects. Note that the Translator does not need to disambiguate complex language constructs since the Original Source Author (or his Author Proxy) has
already done that by marking-up the document. Neither does the Translator need to know the meaning of all terms in the source document since the meaning can be
looked up in the termbank. Neither does the Translator need to know the specialist target language term since that can also be looked up in the termbank (it was
placed there by the Target Subject Specialist).
 

The Target Document Adapter

He is a monolingual and knows the needs and abilities of a target audience for a document. His role is to adapt the message of the author to suit a particular audience
and purpose that could not be fully considered by the author. He only needs to be monolingual since an accurate message of the author has been provided by the
translator.

The Terminologist

He knows how to categorise and roughly assess the adequacy of the information provided by the other actors. He knows the needs of the various clients of term data and their sensitivity to quality/quantity of data.

The System Administrator

He knows how to preserve the term information in its highest structural form and how to make it available in suitable format and in a timely fashion to different clients. He know how to coordinate and record changes to the data and how to resolve conflicts..  
 
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