PaTrans - a MT-system. Development and implementation of and experiences from a MT-system

1. Background Lingtech A/S (A/S = Inc.) was established by two Danish major patent attorney companies, HofmanBang & Boutard A/S and Lehmann & Ree A/S. The background for the formation of the company was the introduction of the European Patents agreement the effect of which was predicted to give a considerable increase in the number of European patents to be validated in Denmark, and consequently had to be translated into Danish. To be able to meet the increased translation work-load, the two companies decided to use any available modern technology to assist in establishing the translation facilities needed. It was further decided to do so in a joint venture to be carried out through Lingtech A/S, a new company formed for the purpose. 2. Market Research A thorough research of available translations systems on the market proved that none of the existing systems could be used for the purpose. Either they were word to word translating systems or they required the presence of an operator during the translation process. Our need was a system which could work as a "translation factory", i.e a continously process of feeding in documents in English resulting in fully translated documents into Danish. It was recognized that the European Commission had considerably translation problems working with ten official languages, and an approach was made to a Danish member of the European Parliament. Through that source we received documentary material stating the level of machine translation efforts carried out by the EEC. It was understood that EEC ran a project EUROTRA under the supervision of the Danish professor Mrs. Bente Maegaard, who in addition was the manager of Center for Language Technology (CLT), an institution under the Danish Minister of Research and Development. An approach to professor Maegaard subsequently resulted in a series of meetings the conclusion of which was that a cooperation between CLT and Lingtech to further investigate the possibilities of developing a purpose-designed system was started.