This article gathers and summarizes the characteristics of a translation task according to the FEMTI report. As this report points out, the characteristics of the translation task refers to the information flow intended for the output, from the point of view of the agent (human or otherwise) who receives the translation.

Assimilation: the ultimate purpose of the assimilation task (of which translation forms a part) is to monitor a (relatively) large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in (usually) several languages.

Dissemination: the ultimate purpose of dissemination is to deliver to others a translation of douments produced inside the organization.

Communication: the ultimate purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage.

 

Sources:

* Eduard Hovy, Margaret King and Andrei Popescu-Belis. (2003). FEMTI. Retrieved 15:23, April 19, 2008, from http://www.issco.unige.ch:8080/cocoon/femti/printable.html