Machine Translation between Uncommon Language Pairs via a Third Common Language: The Case of Patents

This paper proposes to familiarize the MT users with two major areas of development: (1) To improve translation quality between uncommon language pairs, the use of a third language as the pivot. Various techniques have been shown to be promising when parallel corpora for the uncommon language pairs are not readily available. They require the use of two other language pairs involving a common third language pairing with each member of the initial target pair. (2) The surging demands in the field of patent translation and for efforts to bootstrap machine translation in uncommon language pairs (e.g., Japanese and Chinese) via more common language pairs (e.g., Chinese-English and English-Japanese), and the application of the pivot approach to expedite processing.