MT in the Online Environment: Challenges and Opportunities

Integrating machine translation in online services poses a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Through the information superhighway, speakers of different languages can now communicate without the obstacles of time and distance. Yet language remains a barrier to communication in many cases. Draft quality machine translation (MT) can serve as a communication facilitator among online users who speak different languages. For the first time in the history of MT, millions of users will be exposed to machine translated text through online services. The potential exists for MT to become a part of daily communication, rather than a tool of the specialist. At the same time, the challenges of machine translating online text are formidable. Online texts are often hastily composed and contain spelling, grammar, punctuation and accent errors. The traditional strategy of using subject-specific dictionaries according to the text's topic is often ineffective in the online translation environment, since message topics are varied and highly changeable. Though fast by comparison to human translators, many MT systems will need to become a great deal faster to cope with the enormous volumes of online text, and the users' demands for near real-time information. CompuServe has recently begun integration of machine translation in some of its online services. One of these services, the World Community forum, is an online discussion area where CompuServe members can converse on topics of cross-cultural interest. There are over 600 special interest forums available on CompuServe. Translations of messages are provided between English and French, German and Spanish. In its first month of operation, more than 900,000 words were translated on the World Community forum alone. CompuServe will also introduce an e-mail translation service in mid 1995. This service will provide low cost document translation at two quality levels, and will support major word-processing formats. Unedited MT output will be returned within minutes; most edited jobs within 24 hours at low cost to the user. MT in the Online Environment