WORD SENSE SELECTION IN A ONE - TO - MANY , INTERACTIVE COMPUTER - ASSISTED TRANSLATION SYSTEM by Jill

The Interactive Translation System (ITS) under development by Translation Sciences Institute (TSI), at Brigham Young University in the United States, faces an interesting challenge. It is a one—to—many system. English is to be translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Chinese. The challenge here is that "definitions" in the source language cannot be taylor—made to f i t any one target language, because each target language tends to need different distinctions. In addition, some distinctions which can be made in English are not useful in the target languages, so time may be lost by making a l l of them. TSI is currently investigating ways in which interaction between the computer and a human operator can be most effectively used in dealing with this problem.