Building Term Dictionaries for Machine Translation in Practice: A User Experience

This paper discusses the work being carried out at Cap Volmac on tools and services involving controlled languages and MT pre-editing. It focuses on the planning involved in implementing projects for authoring environments, based on experiences of the last 5 years. It describes the steps to be taken for a successful implementation. These steps involve typical activities such as analysis, design, product selection, development, and integration, both on the IT and linguistic side. The main focus of the paper will be on the following aspects: language specification (company specific, industry specific, application specific, generic), active intervention/ author support during document writing/editing and organisational requirements. This paper will conclude a brief discussion of expected development, in terms of links to other automated (sub)systems, such as mark-up languages (structure of the document), document Management and Workflow Management (status of document), PDM (external data) Drs Michiel de Koning Mr. M. C. de Koning is project manager at Cap Volmac in the Netherlands. For the last three years, he has been involved in the development of tools and services based on the application of controlled languages for MT projects. Prior to that, he was active as a IT consultant on various projects. Mr. de Koning has a Masters degree in Linguistics at the Utrecht University. Cap Volmac Active Documentation is a collective term for the consultancy, services and tools provided by Cap Volmac which support the production process of documentation. Active Documentation is part of Cap Volmac Team Support Technology B.V., which incorporates document production, document usage (retrieval, publication), document storage (DMS), groupware (Lotus Notes), and workflow automation (DIS/WFM). Active Documentation focuses on content management and, more specifically, languageand text technology. Automated correction and machine translation systems, text structuring (SGML), terminology management and document conversion are a few examples. Cap Volmac in the Netherlands is a member of the Cap Gemini Group, a world-wide IT consultancy and services firm. Drs Michiel de Koning, Cap Volmac Active Documentation Daltonlaan 400 Pobox 2575, 3500GN Utrecht, The Netherlands