The Automatic Translation of Film Subtitles. A Machine Translation Success Story?

Every so often one hears the complaint that 50 years of research in Machine Translation (MT) has not resulted in much progress, and that current MT systems are still unsatisfactory. A closer look reveals that web-based general-purpose MT systems are used by thousands of users every day. And, on the other hand, special-purpose MT systems have been in long-standing use and work successfully in particular domains or for specific companies. This paper1 investigates whether the automatic translation of film subtitles can be considered a machine translation success story. We describe various projects on MT of film subtitles and contrast them to our own project in this area. We argue that the text genre “film subtitles” is well suited for MT, in particular for Statistical MT. But before we look at the translation of film subtitles let us retrace some other MT success stories. Hutchins (1999) lists a number of successful MT systems. Amongst them is Météo, a system for translating Canadian weather reports between English and French which is probably the most quoted MT system in practical use. References to Météo usually remind us that this is a “highly constrained sublanguage system”. On the other hand there are general purpose but customer-specific MT systems like the English to Spanish MT system at the Pan American Health Organization or the PaTrans system which Hutchins (1999) calls “... possibly the best known success story for custom-built MT”. PaTrans was developed for LingTech A/S to translate English patents into Danish. Earlier (Whitelock and Kilby (1995), p.198) had called the METAL system “a success story in the development of MT”. METAL is mentioned as “successfully used at a number of European companies” (by that time this meant a few dozen installations in industry, trade or banking). During the same time the European Union has been successfully using a customized version of Systran for its translation service but also later for online access by all its employees. Broad coverage systems like METAL and Systran have always resulted in a translation quality that required post-editing before publications.