At the last MT Summit conference this century, this paper looks back briefly at what has happened in the 50 years since MT began, reviews the present situation, and speculates on what the future may bring. Progress in the basic processes of computerized translation has not been as dramatic as developments in computer technology and software. There is still much scope for the improvement of the ...

While most of recent machine translation work has focus on the gisting application (i.e., translating web pages), another important application is to aid human translators. To build better computer aided translation tools, we first need to understand how human translators work. We discuss how human translators work and what tools they typically use. We also build a novel tool that offers post-e...

Within the last few years portable “electronic dictionaries” have been introduced. I These gadgets were originally intended to help foreign travelers communicate with the natives. The devices, which cost from $2W-$300, are initially a lot of fun. But often they prove to be less useful than a good bilingual dictionary or phrasebook because they are so limited in vocabulary. The models I tested] ...

From the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) (Pierce et al., 1966) machine translation (MT) evaluations of the ‘60s to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) (Olive, 2008) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (NIST, 2008) MT evaluations of today, the U.S. Government has been instrumental in e...

Machine translation post-editing is becoming commonplace and professional translators are often faced with this unknown task with little training and support. Given the different translation processes involved during post-editing, research suggests that untrained translators do not necessarily make good post-editors. Besides, the post-editing activity will be largely influenced by numerous aspe...

Machine Translation (MT) systems and Translation Aids (TA) aiming at costeffective high quality final translation are not yet usable by small firms, departments and individuals, and handle only a few languages and language pairs. This is due to a variety of reasons, some of them not frequently mentioned. But commercial, technical and cultural reasons make it mandatory to find ways to democratiz...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints undertook an extensive effort at the beginning of this year to deploy machine translation (MT) in the translation workflow for the content on its principal website, www.lds.org. The objective of this effort is to reduce by at least 50% the time required by human translators to translate English content into nine other languages and publish it on t...

In this paper, I attempt to contextualise computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools from a theoretical and a professional perspective and to model the usability of these tools. The theoretical contextualisation of CAT tools is based on Risku’s (2004) cognitive translational theory of Situated Translation, which claims that cognition is not isolated in the translator’s head but emerges in dynami...

This paper considers the role of translation software, especially Machine Translation (MT), in curricula for students of computational linguistics, for trainee translators and for language learners. These three sets of students have differing needs and interests, although there is some overlap between them. A brief historical view of MT in the classroom is given, including comments on the autho...

There have been several attempts to realize the idea of a fully automatic translation system for text translation to replace human translators. By contrast, little work has been put into building tools to aid human translators. This report describes the ideas behind such a tool. The tool is intended to aid human translators in achieving higher productivity and better quality, by presenting term...