Glossary-Based MT Engines in a Multilingual Analyst‘s Workstation Architecture

Abstract

Fast access to information in different languages is still a major problem for many organizations. We have built a multilingual analyst‘s workstation integrated in the Tipster document management toolkit. The analyst workstation offers to an English-speaking analyst a variety of tools to browse sets of documents in Arabic, Japanese, Spanish and Russian, including a Unicode-based multilingual editor, and a simple machine translation functionality. The Temple project has developed an open multilingual architecture and software support for rapid development of extensible machine translation functionalities. The targeted languages are those for which natural language processing and human resources are scarce or difficult to obtain. The goal is to support rapid development of machine translation functionalities in a very short time with limited resources. Glossary-based machine-translation (GBMT) is used to provide an English gloss of a foreign document. A GBMT system uses a bilingual phrasal dictionary (glossary) to produce a phrase-by-phrase translation. Translation (based on phrase pattern-matching) is fast and accurate regarding the content of the document and browsed documents can be translated almost in real-time. A GBMT system for a language pair is also extremely simple, cheap and fast to develop. Moreover, all language resources used by the system are entirely under the control of the user.