Machine translation applications - first findings

Users

Home users

1. Automatically translate web pages
2. Translate chat

Organizational users (companies, government)

1. Classifying documents as “needing human translation” or “not”; estimating effort needed for translation
2. Localization support [e.g. for instruction manuals]
3. Translation of email, documents, reports etc.

Professional users (translators)

1. Support tools for translators who do post-editing

Unclassified

1. Spoken language translation (where is it used?)

Languages

1. From European languages to Chinese/Japanese/Arabic and vice versa.
2. From one European language to another
3. Other languages include - Korean

Comment

In general, even the best MT systems in use today are mainly useful to get a general idea/gist of the text. Grammar and preservation of meaning can not be guaranteed. The main use cases for such limited functionality could be -

• Automatic translation of websites, but only where the objective is doing something on the website [e.g. booking tickets/hotel rooms, shopping for goods which shoppers already know about], or getting some information. It is not suited for reading articles or literary works. The sentences should be small (and hence easier to translate). [e.g. titles of menus, small descriptions of the services offered by the site etc., news snippets]
• Tools that assist human translators [e.g. localization support tools].
• Chatting
• Online service for naive users – for applications similar to the above, except that the text is in some other system where there is no translation feature provided [e.g. where the chat client does not provide translation].

Applications of MT system components

1. Spell-check, grammar-check
2. Dictionary/thesaurus – mono and bi-lingual
3. Multi-lingual search (thematic search, query translation)

Applications where MT is a component

1. Speech translation
2. OCR