An Interactive Translation Support Facility for Non-Professional Users

We present an interactive translation method to support non-professional users to write an original document. The method, combining dictionary lookup function and user-guided stepwise interactive machine translation, allows the user to obtain clear result with an easy operation. We implemented the method as an English writing support facility that serves as a translation support front-end to an arbitrary application. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n With the steady decrease of network communication cost and equipment prices, world-wide computer networks and the number of its users are growing very rapidly. However, there is a large obstacle against global communication over networks, namely the language barrier, especially for non English-speaking people. This is a major reason personal EJ (English to Japanese) machine translation systems are gaining popularity in Japan. They help the user to quickly grasp the content of web pages, by providing rough translation. Since speed and lexical coverage are most important requirements, conventional automatic machine translation systems developed so far are useful for this purpose. Contrary to the EJ direction, the major task in JE (Japanese to English) direction will be writing short original documents, such as e-mail. The most important requirement will be translation quality, because the reader is usually different from the MT user. To control quality, some kind of human interaction will be inevitable. However, interactive support for conventional MT systems doesn't seem suitable for these users, since they are primarily intended for professional translators. Their post-editing function often requires working in a special environment that requires special training. An interactive, easy-touse translation support facility, targeted for nonprofessional translators, is desirable. We may expect that these users have basic knowledge and ability to read and understand English. This expectation is natural and realistic in a country like Japan, where all high-school graduates are supposed to have completed six year course in English. Their reading skill and grammar knowledge is usually enough to judge the quality of current MT systems, but they may need help from MT systems when browsing the Internet. For the JE direction, they will not be satisfied with the raw output of conventional MT systems, but it will be too laborious to write down English sentence from scratch. For these users, online dictionaries have been used because of the reliability of the result. However, in spite of abundant information within the dictionary such as inflection, verbal case frame, idioms and so on, the only electronically available part is spelling of translation equivalents (through copy & paste). Other information is only presented to be read as in the case of a paper dictionary, with all further work left to the user. In this article, we present an interactive translation method and its implementation, which has advantages of both a dictionary look-up tool and a machine translation system. The system has an interactive interface similar to Kana-Kanji conversion method, and initially serves as a dictionary lookup tool. After dictionary lookup, the user can invoke syntactic transformation in terms of grammatical information in the dictionary. Syntactic transformation proceeds step by step in a bottom-up manner, combining smaller translation components into larger ones. This "dictionary-based interactive translation" approach allows the user to fully utilize syntactic information in the dictionary while maintaining clarity of the result. In the next section, we give a simple example of translation steps and provide a general idea of the method. In section 3, we describe the basic model and associated operations. Section 4 gives further