Tracking Inconsistencies in Parallel Multilingual Documents

Translation practices in parallel multilingual documents are bound to generate inconsistencies in the documents due to missing information or part of document not translated, changes not propagated across languages, unavailability of same information in all languages. In this research, we present a mechanism to manage inconsistencies in parallel multilingual documents. To model inconsistencies in the multilingual contents, we propose a state transition model to define the states of sentences in the documents, the actions performed on the sentences and the set of transition functions. We then define consistency rules to signal the states of sentences resulting in inconsistencies. We illustrated the proposed mechanism with a case study on tracking inconsistencies in the multilingual MediaWiki Installation Guide as a tool support for tracking inconsistent portions such as missing information, changes not propagated and unavailability of same information in multilingual documents.