ProZ.com Translation Forums

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Translators into English will be challenged by robots!

Arthur Allmendinger — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 06:30:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Arthur Allmendinger
Post title: Translators into English will be challenged by robots!

[quote]Williamson wrote:

Once a machine can "understand" language, it can also be programmed to interpret or translate much faster than a human being.

[/quote]

I think that at least a correct translation/interpretation from all wide-spread languages into a controlled version of English will be possible in the near future.

That means the translators/interpreters into English will be challenged by robots quite soon.

:-)

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | The future has arrived!

Barnaby Capel-Dunn — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:50:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Barnaby Capel-Dunn
Post title: The future has arrived!

For those of you who can understand French (as opposed to the French...):
[url removed]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | new events in speech-to-speech translation systems

Jeff Allen — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:48:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: new events in speech-to-speech translation systems

[quote]Jeff Allen wrote:
Simultaneous speech translation:

My background in fact includes speech-enabled translation with both speech recognition and speech synthesis modules....( [url removed] )....

At CMU, we developed complete birectional speech-to-speech translation systems for several language pairs .... used at least for periods of time in real-user contexts for which they were designed (basically military checkpoints and humanitarian organization efforts in war zones).

... "Full-scale simulataneous speech translation will be ready in about 5 years"

Do I believe that? No.

Yet I do believe that in another 5 years there will be more improved speech-enabled and speech-interactive systems that could be combined with text-based translation systems...

[/quote]

See below links to a press release and a follow-up article of the event that just appeared during the past week on speech-to-speech translation systems.
I will comment on this in the coming week as time permits.

Jeff
[url removed]

======= begin paste ===========

[url removed]
October 18, 2005

Carnegie Mellon and University of Karlsruhe To Demonstrate Breakthroughs In Cross Lingual Communication and Speech-to-Speech Translation

and the follow-up article ......

[url removed]
Lost in translation? New technology comes to the rescue
By RAMESH SANTANAM
The Associated Press
October 27, 2005

======= end paste ===========

[Edited at 2005-10-31 17:24]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | expert linguists not needed for using MT systems

Jeff Allen — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:26:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: expert linguists not needed for using MT systems

[quote]Victor Dewsbery wrote:
2. The expert and the quack (and perhaps the pragmatist)
The systems that Jeff presents seem to be very much at the high end - i.e. heavily dependent on hands-on work by an expert linguist for pre-processing and post-processing, and with a hefty emphasis on "teaching" the system as you go along (and the associated need for a computer expert to oversee or carry out the process). This is probably only viable for the "global big players" in business communication, because the investment in equipment, in continuity of (human) support expertise and the long-term gains of "teaching" the system are likely to be unviable for anyone else.
[/quote]

Expert Linguists:
There is not really a need for an expert linguist. In July 2003, I trained 2 technical writers and 1 Human Resource Assistant in the same company (all together in the same room) to use a professional/expert version of a commercially available MT tool. Within 3 hours they were all creating customized dictionaries based on their own documents that had been used to prepare the course exercises. None of them are expert linguists. One has a degree in translation, another one a diploma in technical writing.
A couple of months before I gave a 1-2 hour training session to a bilingual secretary.

Computer Experts:
Also, no need for computer geeks/nerds/experts to monitor the process for PC and Mac workstation based systems. Several of the modern versions of MT systems have user-friendly interfaces in the dictionary editor modules and the translation environement modules.

About 10 years ago, I did work on a system that was much more linguistically complex and which required knowing and using more linguistic meta-language to use the system. It took me much time to develop training courses that simplified the information presented by that system to the level of understanding of linguistics of the user audience. Yet, it was a customized system. Most of the commercial MT products on the market today aim at the level of non-linguist users (who use MT for business and personal correspondence), which requires providing more user-friendly words and terms in the interface that will be understandable to the users.

Equipment:
As for equipment, it varies from MT program to program. Yet I still do test all of them on a Windows 98 First Edition with 64Mb RAM, 350Mhz processor and then from there move to testing on other plaforms of various hardware configurations and OS configurations such as Win 2000, WinXP, etc. A couple of the current MT software packages still work fine on the Win98 platform.

Training/Teaching the system:
I completed a fully documented MT project a few months ago with fully documented log sheets on what was done. This allows to provide benchmarked baseline information on productivity in the using the system. For a sample of approx 75 marketing press releases (approx 100 words each), most of them coming from different product and service announcements from different customer, in 1145 minutes I was able to manually hand analyze all of the text, identify all potential dictionary candidates (1000 entries), create an Excel-based glossary of all candidate terms, sort out which candidates were not necessary and streamline the dictionary down to half the size, translate all terms to be entered, code all entries + all variant and alternative entry forms, test all dictionary entries on the specific context text as well as alternate texts, retranslate and retest, and post-edit the final resulting text.

And the majority of this was done using MS Word and MS Excel on a Pocket PC or on a laptop sitting in a train or standing in a metro/subway during 15-30 minute trips. Only a few of the sessions were performed at a desk or in the yard with a computer for periods of longer than 1 hour.

All the work, the amount of entries created, and other tasks were carefully logged to provide benchmarked information on what can be done with a real translation project in time-limited and location-constrained contexts.

I even logged MT software bugs during that time, including 1 hour lost due to conversion issues between Pocket 2002 Excel and MS Excel 2003.
One of my next tasks is to measure the amount of time lost due to a missing feature (that I logged) which required me to hand code at least a hundred entries which should have been importable semi-automatically if the feature had been available for the usage that I reported (since it is available for a parallel usage in the same product).

These 75 marketing press releases represent 3 single date publications among press releases that have been published every 2-3 week for the past 10 years.

Another next step would be to run the entire set of 10 years of press release through the optimized minimal dictionary of about 500 terms and see how it fares for extended coverage.

All of these techniques can be taught to anyone who has an interest in words and terminology, understands the essential basics of word grouping, and has an interest in translation.

Jeff
[url removed]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | We won't see machine translations in the foreseable future

Morten Olesen — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:43:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Morten Olesen
Post title: We won't see machine translations in the foreseable future

It is utterly unrealistic to think that we will see software that can translate correctly in the foreseable future. It will take more than one or two geniuses to solve the linguistic code that governs human speech - and certainly not Microsoft, who are good at one thing: operating systems for machines, which are slightly less complicated, I fear,than the human brain.
Voila

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | No matter what, a computer is not a human, at least not for the next ten years.

Angus Woo — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 03:28:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Angus Woo
Post title: No matter what, a computer is not a human, at least not for the next ten years.

The question in fact is age-old: Can a computer think like a human brain? Make decisions the way we do?

The answer can only be too obvious. The so called artificial intelligence technology so far has been miles from satisfactory. And though it is still painstakingly inching forward, nothing fundamental is likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

If, just if, a computer can indeed think like a human brain, then the issue will, with mathematical certainty, concern not only translators and interpreters but the entire human race.

Our lives will no longer be the same ever. The world would become something we can't dream about even in our wildest dreams.

Think how scary that can be.

[Edited at 2005-10-19 04:01]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | I am not worried

alexandra123 — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 07:47:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: alexandra123
Post title: I am not worried

I am not worried aobut this, simply because I think that it is another one of many attempts to oversimplify something that is very complex. Translation and interpretation both require not only the ability to speak two or more languages, but they also require a whole array of senses, for example, compassion, the ability to adjust to constantly changing moods in a conversation, the ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes, the ability to think with and ahead of the person you are translating or interpreting for and many pther things that a machine simply cannot and will never be able to do with the accuracy that a human can. Sure attempts can be made to emulate these abilities in a machine, but the machine will be limited to whatever is programmed into it. As for voice recognition, if they have not been able to fine-tune voice recognition in cell phones, (and that has been around for a while now), to the voice changes of the humans using this technology, I wonder if theya are far enough in their research to be able to even apporach the subject at a much greater scale. To give an example of the problems I have encountered with voice recognition on cell phones. I have tried using it, say for dialing my home number (I say "home")...but if I say it in a tone that is not the same as the tone I used when I recorded the word on the phone, it simply does not dial. I can't have a sore throat, or am in a crowded and loud place because it will not work. So I think there is still a lot of work to be done, if they do plan to comeout with something like that. Besides, if they do "revolutionize the market" with that type of technology, it will probably have a peak in sales at first, but then people will realize that there are indeed things that cannot substitute "human" translation or interpretation.

anyway, I hope I have not bored you with all this and I hope it makes sense. These are just my thoughts on the whole thing.

Greetings everyone,

alexandra123

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Can of worms

Victor Dewsbery — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 08:04:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Victor Dewsbery
Post title: Can of worms

This whole debate brings up a number of issues.

1. Redefining the idea of the "native speaker"
An old chestnut in the trade: should we translate into or from our native language?
How good must we be in our foreign language before we translate into it on a professional basis?
Is it good enough to translate into our foreign language and then get a native speaker to proofread the result and repair the damage?
However, with MT, the concept of the "native speaker" loses much of its force. Or the process become similar to drafting by a non-native and proofreading (sorry, post-editing) by a native.

2. The expert and the quack (and perhaps the pragmatist)
The systems that Jeff presents seem to be very much at the high end - i.e. heavily dependent on hands-on work by an expert linguist for pre-processing and post-processing, and with a hefty emphasis on "teaching" the system as you go along (and the associated need for a computer expert to oversee or carry out the process). This is probably only viable for the "global big players" in business communication, because the investment in equipment, in continuity of (human) support expertise and the long-term gains of "teaching" the system are likely to be unviable for anyone else.
The quack is the computer nerd who thinks that you can feed in any old language and the computer will do its stuff, irrespective of context and without any pre-processing and post-editing. Long live Babelfish, because without it, a comical literary genre (the hopeless mistranslation) would vanish.
The pragmatist would probably be somewhere in between, someone like us who uses an off-the-peg MT program occasionally but realises that you can't rely on the product, or can only do so with a big pinch of salt for a very limited range of uses. Or in another variant, the translator using a CAT tool mainly to increase productivity.

3. The "little-old-me" factor
What will become of my earning power? Will the development force me to stop translating and move over to post-editing at half my present hourly rate?
This is not a new concern and not restricted to translating (it hit manufacturing trades long before it came to us).
This can of course be compounded into a whole range of economic polarisation theories (all the world economy needs is a handful of global business owners and a few million cheap labourers, and we fall into the latter category. Everybody is involved in the wealth-creation process, but nobody ever gets to see any wealth.)
In other words, just a compounded variant of the price squeeze that some agencies and other clients already try to employ without MT (similar to the price squeeze on suppliers which enables your friendly corner supermarket to offer you rock-bottom prices).

4. Translation - repetitive task or creative work?
In his long reply a couple of days ago, Jeff wrote "computers are very good at recognizing and working with repetitive things". Does that describe our work? To put it another way, if we process a sentence with a CAT tool or MT tool, do we sometimes feel that it is best to scrap the suggested translation and start all over again?
In fact, this concept comes up in the thesis by Lorena Guerra which Jeff referred us to at:
[url removed] s.pdf
She writes that MT post-editors must actually be trained not to do a complete re-write of the MT translation, but only to edit it as far as is really necessary.
This is perhaps an important question for the ongoing discussion - is language creative or repetitive? There are obviously elements of both, but what is predominant in the work we do?

Oh well, must get some work (!?!?!) done. Perhaps someone will come up with interesting comments to push the discussion forward.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | alternative translation feature in MT packages

Jeff Allen — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:36:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: alternative translation feature in MT packages

[quote]Jeff Whittaker wrote:

If professional translators disagree on the correct translation of a word, term or phrase (see KudoZ for numerous examples), then how will a computer (or the person who programs the computer) ever "decide" which translation to use?

[/quote]

The alternative translation option feature and the hide/show alternative translation feature in the "professional level versions" of MT software allow you to code and then use the options during the translation process. I've described in the PROMT, Reverso and SYSTRAN sections of my MT tips site ( [url removed] ) how such features are available in those software packages.

Jeff
[url removed]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | An example

Barnaby Capel-Dunn — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 17:59:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Barnaby Capel-Dunn
Post title: An example

Jeff,
When I read your message I happened to be looking at a Microsoft text about Word Viewer (in French).

I ran an automatic translation and got this result:

"Word Viewer enables you to open documents Word 2003 and documents created with all the preceding versions of Microsoft Word for Windows and Microsoft Word for Macintosh. In addition to the files of document Word (doc), you can open the files recorded with the following formats:...."

Not perfect by any means but pretty accurate. Compare with Microsoft's own original English text:

"Word Viewer 2003 lets you open Word 2003 documents and documents created with all previous versions of Microsoft Word for Windows and Microsoft Word for Macintosh. In addition to Word document files (.doc), you can also open files saved in the following formats:..."

Obviously, no self-respecting translator would be happy with the first version (but don't forget this is MT and not CAT) but surely it is accurate enough for many situations?

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Quality

Jeff Whittaker — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 13:23:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Whittaker
Post title: Quality

How can you provide "quality" without "accuracy"?

[quote]Barnaby Capel-Dunn wrote:

at a professional level, isn't it also the case that a) many (most?) of us handle the same sort of text over and over again, and b) (this is a terrible thing to say but nonetheless true) in many cases the quality, as opposed to the accuracy, of the translation is not of primary importance? If it IS true, then surely we can expect "machines" to play an increasing role in the years ahead?[/quote]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | That's true but....

Barnaby Capel-Dunn — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 10:22:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Barnaby Capel-Dunn
Post title: That's true but....

[quote]Jeff Whittaker wrote:

If professional translators disagree on the correct translation of a word, term or phrase (see KudoZ for numerous examples), then how will a computer (or the person who programs the computer) ever "decide" which translation to use?

[/quote]

at a professional level, isn't it also the case that a) many (most?) of us handle the same sort of text over and over again, and b) (this is a terrible thing to say but nonetheless true) in many cases the quality, as opposed to the accuracy, of the translation is not of primary importance? If it IS true, then surely we can expect "machines" to play an increasing role in the years ahead?

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Even professionals don't always agree

Jeff Whittaker — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 05:40:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Whittaker
Post title: Even professionals don't always agree

If professional translators disagree on the correct translation of a word, term or phrase (see KudoZ for numerous examples), then how will a computer (or the person who programs the computer) ever "decide" which translation to use?

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Controlled Language, Speech translation, etc

Jeff Allen — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:55:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: Controlled Language, Speech translation, etc

To use Controlled language or not?:

[quote]Victor Dewsbery wrote:
As far as I can see, the projects outlined in the links tend to be very focussed on the role of the expert guiding the individual project, and the roles of pre-processing and post-editing. To some extent, controlled source language also seems to be an issue.[/quote]

All "controlled language only" and "controlled language + MT" projets are listed in one of my conference talks last year:

Introductory overview of Controlled Languages. Invited talk presented at the Society for Technical Communication meeting of the Paris, France chapter. 2 April 2004.
[url removed]

Multilingual Controlled Languages. Invited talk presented at the Society for Technical Communication meeting of the Paris, France chapter. 2 April 2004.
[url removed]

Conference keynote talk on Controlled Language and Machine Translation, May 5-6, 2004
[url removed]

My projects over the past few years on MT dictionary development + postediting do not include controlled language (CL). I've been demonstrating that MT can be productive without CL. When any type of input source language standardization efforts (writing guidelines, spell-checking, CL, terminology standardization, etc) are performed, this will tend to favorably impact the translation process. However, I will cite one of my former colleagues, the late Eric Adolphson, who stated at the CLAW98 conference
that the problem with CL is that it is possible to write in good CL and in bad CL, depending on how well people are trained, and if a CL editing process is conducted. So, yes, it is possible for authors to write in bad CL and negatively impact the target translations. Yet, we see this already in writing/translation workflows that do not including CL.

Simultaneous speech translation:

[quote]Victor Dewsbery wrote: This thread started with a rather different idea, i.e. a quote summarised from Bill Gates: "... Microsoft's founder thinks that within 5 years, the keyboard-voice-wiring on screen combination should revolutionise our way of working,in the same way as SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION WHICH SHOULD COME INTO EFFECT AT THIS TIME".
You are at the cutting edge of MT. Do you regard such visions (which are by no means new) as hopelessly simplistic, or do you feel it is simply a matter of time?[/quote]

My background in fact includes speech-enabled translation with both speech recognition and speech synthesis modules. I organized, conducted and supervised the speech data collection projects for several hundred participants for the EngHaitian Creole and EngKorean speech-to-speech translation projects at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) ( [url removed] ). I was also Technical Director of speech system language resources for a couple of years at ELDA around the year 2000. Several of my articles on speech translation are at [url removed]

At CMU, we developed complete birectional speech-to-speech translation systems for several language pairs (different language typologies) and even provided conference papers/posters which indicated comparative charts on the timeframe needed to get the different systems up and running. At that time (1997-1998), we were creating what I would refer to as "interactive bilingual speech/text translation" systems. These systems were successfully demo'ed to sponsors and were used at least for periods of time in real-user contexts for which they were designed (basically military checkpoints and humanitarian organization efforts in war zones).

The current thread that started with the Bill Gates quote seems to be a different level, and I interpret this quote to mean: "Full-scale simulataneous speech translation will be ready in about 5 years"

Do I believe that? No.

Yet I do believe that in another 5 years there will be more improved speech-enabled and speech-interactive systems that could be combined with text-based translation systems, and which could be used in various contexts and probably for industrial and business purposes. These will probably be in limited domain and limited vocabulary/terminology areas. For example, weather forecasts are written in more or less defined sublanguage in many languages. Providing speech translation for announcing weather forecasts at the Olympics might be a likely application. Another might be announcing arrival and departure times and information in multiple languages at major transport hubs (airports, train stations).

But such speech translation systems, in my opinion, would not be used in the near future for phone-conversation simultaneous interpretation or conference simultaneous interpretation.

[quote]Victor Dewsbery wrote:
There are of course many other issues involved, such as technical intelligence issues (cf. my rather tongue-in-cheek "typo" posting earlier in this thread) and social and professional issues (are we a dying profession after all, or will we simply be downgraded to half-price post-editors?). And of course the wider questions of the relative roles of computers and humans in our future world (and a new twist in the debate on the question "What are humans here for anyway?").
[/quote]

The typo example is the never-ending "garbage-in/garbage out (GIGO)" debate. And the simple fact is that there is always input garbage. People simply don't use spell-checkers because half the time they provide more noise than necessary. Some of the new MT systems are able to correctly recognize words that do not have accent marks. Even at CMU, a colleague and I developed an accent mark reinsertion module. This was because most of the electronic texts that we were using had been stripped of accent marks 10-15 years ago when issues in text conversion and display which caused the hieroglyphics E10, E11 and other characters for language that had accent marks.

Humans are truly the added-value:

My perspective as stated in conferences and articles has been that computers are binary-restricted, number and code crunching machines that are only as good as what you program them to do. Our computer experts love to try and resolve the 25th century Star Trek language barrier issues. Yet, computers are very good at recognizing and working with repetitive things. And many humans hate to redo the same operation 25 million times in a single day, unless they already see themselves as a low-value player in the system and don't care about when processes can be improved and optimized. So why not use computer-based tools in an optimal way to deal with the mid and high-frequency full-match and partial match repetitive sequences, and for content gisting of what you don't understand, and allow the human translators the opportunity to fill the added-value roles as pre-processors, key processors, and post-processors within the translation workflow.

Pure computer programmers do not necessarily agree with me, but then the majority of them do not have many years of experience in human-based translation that I had before I joined the ranks of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Jeff

[Edited at 2005-10-15 23:48]

[Edited at 2006-01-31 22:51]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Thanks, Jeff, for the interesting summary

Victor Dewsbery — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 06:37:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Victor Dewsbery
Post title: Thanks, Jeff, for the interesting summary

[quote]Jeff Allen wrote:
Hi Victor,
Sure, let me explain a few points.

...

Jeff
[/quote]

Thanks for this very interesting and informative summary and the associated links. I have only had time for a cursory scan of some of the links, but they certainly provide food for thought.

As far as I can see, the projects outlined in the links tend to be very focussed on the role of the expert guiding the individual project, and the roles of pre-processing and post-editing. To some extent, controlled source language also seems to be an issue.

This thread started with a rather different idea, i.e. a quote summarised from Bill Gates: "... Microsoft's founder thinks that within 5 years, the keyboard-voice-wiring on screen combination should revolutionise our way of working,in the same way as SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION WHICH SHOULD COME INTO EFFECT AT THIS TIME".
You are at the cutting edge of MT. Do you regard such visions (which are by no means new) as hopelessly simplistic, or do you feel it is simply a matter of time?

There are of course many other issues involved, such as technical intelligence issues (cf. my rather tongue-in-cheek "typo" posting earlier in this thread) and social and professional issues (are we a dying profession after all, or will we simply be downgraded to half-price post-editors?). And of course the wider questions of the relative roles of computers and humans in our future world (and a new twist in the debate on the question "What are humans here for anyway?").

A fascinating subject, and thanks for bringing your expertise into the debate.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | more on MT disambiguation

Jeff Allen — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 22:52:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: more on MT disambiguation

[quote]Nick Lingris wrote:
Is anyone familiar with a machine translation system that has, say, two glosses for one term and knows when to use which?[/quote]

[quote]Jeff Allen wrote:
yes, I worked on and implemented such an MT system at Caterpillar 10 years ago. We had some examples with up to 8 glosses per term for the technical domain, and we put into place a semantic model to semi-automate the choices based on empirical choices made by technical writers and translators over the years. [/quote]

[quote]Victor Dewsbery wrote:

Hi Jeff,
Couldn't find any info about disambiguation on the page quoted - as the URL implies, it seemed to be mainly about (manual?) post-editing. I didn't check the content - there must be 50 or more links on that page, and none of the titles were obviously about semantic disambiguation.

Your subsequent posting seems to concentrate on productivity statistics. (Reading between the lines, these statistics seem to be specific to one particular language pair and heavily dependent on the expertise and experience of the specific post-editor used in the process - were you that post-editor?)

Is there anything you can tell us about your disambuguation process (including what is actually meant by "semi-automate", the breadth of the subject field involved and the effort involved in ascertaining and validating the "empirical choices made ... over the years")?[/quote]

Hi Victor,
Sure, let me explain a few points.

Avoiding the term semantic disambiguation:
None of the titles of my writings explicitely indicate semantic disambiguation. About 10 years ago, they might have. But I was catering to more of a research oriented or academic audience at that time. Since 2000, all of my articles and presentations have gone from 10+ pages down to 1-3 pages. And the titles have tended to become more user-friendly.

Productivity statistics articles:
My subsequent posting containing the productivity stats (the telecom documentation paper) involved the implementation of lexical coding and selection techniques that I've been working on for many years with various commercial MT software packages. I did not explain in the article how it was done since I provide courses on this as an officially certified MT dictionary developer. Nor could I publish the telecom texts because they are confidential customer documentation for a multi-million dollar project.
However, I have shown the texts in person to several translators on different occasions, who have stated that it was significantly better MT output than they have ever seen with any other generic MT system.

My previous post mentioned a new upcoming article. This new article is, in fact, based on texts for which I first obtained authorization by the copyright holders to quote the source texts and the translated results for my articles and conference presentations. This removes the text confidentiality issue which often impedes MT specialists from showing the resulting texts (usually when done in technical fields for major customers).

Methods: 1 person and 1 language pair?:
Yes, I was the person in the telecom translation project. It involved 2 key stages, these being a) dictionary building and b) post-editing.
The methods used are not only restricted to a single language pair, nor are they used only by myself. Lorena Guerra, another Proz member, completed her MA thesis (Human Translation versus Machine Translation and Full Post-Editing of Raw Machine Translation Output) on the topic by using the same basic elements of this methodology. Her thesis is available online at:
[url removed]

A recently completed 10-page internal technical report with supporting documentation prove my dictionary building methodology on a translation project (mentioned in previous post) concerning marketing press release texts. This subsequently led to my official certification in summer 2005 as an expert dictionary builder for a commercial MT software package.

Disambiguation strategies:
As for the disambiguation strategies that were used on the Caterpillar project, the following papers and thesis provide all the details. Several of the articles mention "interactive disambiguation" which was conducted by the source language authors in the beginning stages of the implementation. I was the main user trainer for the deployment among 200 users. One of the papers gives statistics on the corpus size and types of automatic choices used for semantic domain modeling attachment decisions.

Baker, Franz, Jordan, Mitamura and Nyberg (1994)
"Coping With Ambiguity in a Large-Scale Machine Translation System"
Proceedings of COLING-94
[url removed]

Baker, Franz and Jordan (1994)
"Coping With Ambiguity in Knowledge-based Natural Language Analysis"
Proceedings of FLAIRS-94
[url removed]

Mitamura, Nyberg, Torrejon and Igo (1999)
"Multiple Strategies for Automatic Disambiguation in Technical Translation"
Proceedings of TMI-99
[url removed]

Mitamura (1999)
"Controlled Language for Multilingual Machine Translation" (invited paper)
Proceedings of MT Summit, 1999
[url removed]

Eric Crestan, 2001. Improvement of French generation for the KANT machine translation system (Caterpillar sponsored project). Diplme de Recherche Technologique. Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Avignon (LIA) of the Universit d'Avignon.
[url removed]
(Jeff Allen, Chairperson of the thesis defense committee)

Jeff
[url removed]

[Edited at 2005-10-14 07:42]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Which of the many many links relates to disambiguation?

Victor Dewsbery — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:20:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Victor Dewsbery
Post title: Which of the many many links relates to disambiguation?

[quote]Jeff Allen wrote:
[quote]Nick Lingris wrote:
Is anyone familiar with a machine translation system that has, say, two glosses for one term and knows when to use which?[/quote]
yes, I worked on and implemented such an MT system at Caterpillar 10 years ago. We had some examples with up to 8 glosses per term for the technical domain, and we put into place a semantic model to semi-automate the choices based on empirical choices made by technical writers and translators over the years.
Jeff
[url removed]

[/quote]

Hi Jeff,
Couldn't find any info about disambiguation on the page quoted - as the URL implies, it seemed to be mainly about (manual?) post-editing. I didn't check the content - there must be 50 or more links on that page, and none of the titles were obviously about semantic disambiguation.

Your subsequent posting seems to concentrate on productivity statistics. (Reading between the lines, these statistics seem to be specific to one particular language pair and heavily dependent on the expertise and experience of the specific post-editor used in the process - were you that post-editor?)

Is there anything you can tell us about your disambuguation process (including what is actually meant by "semi-automate", the breadth of the subject field involved and the effort involved in ascertaining and validating the "empirical choices made ... over the years")?

[Edited at 2005-10-13 00:23]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | EBMT doesn't necessarily take several person years to build up

Jeff Allen — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:18:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: EBMT doesn't necessarily take several person years to build up

[quote]RobinB wrote:
EBMT might, conceivably, work for extremely narrowly defined subject areas, in a small number of language pairs, where the source texts for translation display a high degree of homogeneity in terms of structure and content (and we're moving towards controlled language here). But you'd still need a dozen or so person-years to validate the reference documents. And by the time you'd done that, the documents would be obsolete...[/quote]

I ran the translation lab of a multilingual EBMT project for several typologically different languages (Croatian, Haitian Creole, Korean, Arabic, French, Spanish) in which we demonstrated and published papers on our methods for rapidly building up EBMT databases for multi-topic and multi-domain translation.
Haitian Creole took the longest amount of time, because of issues regarding literacy levels of users/translators, and yet that only took 1 year to build up the database for the translation system (including a two-level editing process for all texts).
A detailed paper on our methods used for the translation team was presented in the following paper:
ALLEN, Jeffrey and Christopher HOGAN. 1998. Expanding lexical coverage of parallel corpora for the Example-Based Machine Translation approach. In Proceedings of the First International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC98), 28-30 May 1998, Granada, Spain. Vol. 2, pp. 747-754.
available at: [url removed]

Jeff
[url removed]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | MT disambiguation and MT case studies

Jeff Allen — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:04:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: MT disambiguation and MT case studies

[quote]RobinB wrote:
Disambiguation is the "silver bullet" of MT, and nobody's come even remotely close to cracking that particular problem using MT. But there again, most humans can't hack it either[/quote]

On the contrary, disambiguation was the key focus of the MT system that we implemented at Caterpillar.

Also, last year (Sept 2004), I presented a MT case study on translation productivity with a focus on dictionary building and disambiguation configuration. It concerns two key pre-sales and post-sales documents for key major customer (big money) contracts -- not cheap or low-quality translation projects. The documents were translated and edited using MT systems in record time, compared to tradition human translation without the use of TM tools, validated by several depts for textual accuracy and acceptability, and were used and accepted by the end customers. And the customers came back to buy more of the software and services, so the translations were simply "exactly what the customer expected and required".

The full text (6 pages) of this case study is available at:
[url removed] #211575

Another set of productivity measurements for MT in a 2 page article that is listed and available at:
[url removed] #212760

And I'm currently working on a new article based on a 10-page internal technical report (including detailed logs of time spent on all stages of involvement in the project) for an MT project I conducted in Spring 2005. This report shows high-level translation quality achieved with translation productivity that takes less time (total 19 hours) than recorded on any similar project in the past. This is based on new special techniques of text analysis and dictionary building.
And this in using commercial MT systems to translate marketing field press release texts, something which I know few people would even choose to use MT for.

Jeff
-----
Jeff Allen, Ph.D.
Paris, France
[url removed]

[Edited at 2006-02-14 23:25]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | multiple glosses in MT systems

Jeff Allen — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:23:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Jeff Allen
Post title: multiple glosses in MT systems

[quote]Nick Lingris wrote:

Is anyone familiar with a machine translation system that has, say, two glosses for one term and knows when to use which?[/quote]

yes, I worked on and implemented such an MT system at Caterpillar 10 years ago. We had some examples with up to 8 glosses per term for the technical domain, and we put into place a semantic model to semi-automate the choices based on empirical choices made by technical writers and translators over the years.

Jeff
[url removed]

[Edited at 2005-10-12 20:35]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Your examples through actual MT

Riccardo Schiaffino — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:01:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Riccardo Schiaffino
Post title: Your examples through actual MT

[quote]Peter Linton wrote:
The monkey ate the banana because it was hungry.
The monkey ate the banana because it was ripe.
The monkey ate the banana because it was time for tea.
[/quote]

Peter, if I run your examples through an actual MT system, this is what I get (into Italian):

La scimmia ha mangiato la banana perch era affamata.
[correct]
La scimmia ha mangiato la banana perch era matura.
[correct]
La scimmia ha mangiato la banana perch era tempo per t.
[not correct: should be "l'ora del t", but easily intelligible]

Of course, both "scimmia" and "banana" are feminine in Italian, so I replaced the monkey with a lion:

Il leone ha mangiato la banana perch era affamato.
[correct]
Il leone ha mangiato la banana perch era maturo.
[not correct: translated as if "it" referred to the lion, not the banana]
Il leone ha mangiato la banana perch era tempo per t.
[not correct: should be "l'ora del t", but easily intelligible]

This test was done using a free demo of an MT program that uses the systran engine.

The fact that the program does not "understand" the context, and that therefore cannot distinguish an "it" from another, is, I think, irrelevant to most realistic uses of MT:

1) when used for gisting, or to give a rough translation of something, level of quality in examples such as those above, is more than enough.
2) when used as another tool that a human translator can use to improve his or her productivity

[Modificato alle 2005-10-13 22:10]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | The voice of wisdom

Barnaby Capel-Dunn — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 14:18:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Barnaby Capel-Dunn
Post title: The voice of wisdom

I absolutely agree with everything you write, Andrew. As you say, the problem/challenge/opportunity is to keep abreast of developments and this is not always an easy task, especially as one gets older (my case!). But I wonder how many people would agree with me that they get almost as much pleasure out of dealing with the technical environment surrounding our profession as from the process of translation itself. When one translates in industrial quantitites - as we have to do if we are to make a living - the "joy" of translating inevitably palls a little but I feel that the "technical" aspect (keeping up to date with developments in CAT and other software, Internet search, etc.) can go some way towards offsetting this phenomenon.
What do you think?

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?

Andrew Steel — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 08:50:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Andrew Steel

My feeling is that there is no need for translators to worry about being usurped, though we will need to worry about keeping up with technology.

I don't think anybody who has looked closely at MT and the predictions for the future believes that these systems will eliminate human intervention.

Let's take a look at the impact of technology on other professions, such as architects and accountants. CAD software and accountancy packages have changed their work enormously. However, even though a client could buy the programs from their local dealer, they would be unlikely to achieve the same results as the professionals.

It is the knowledge of how to fully exploit the technology for a specific purpose, not the technology per se, that clients will pay for.

What technology has done for architects and accountants is enable them to provide a better quality service (3D virtual tours of their designs, or elimination of mathematical errors) much more rapidly than they could in the past, essentially offering a better price-to-quality ratio.

However, I don't see any evidence of architects and accountants being made obsolete.

The key for translators, like the aforementioned professions, is that we need to view our work primarily in terms of rate per hour, not per unit of work performed.

Therefore, taking a hypothetical case, if technology enables us to produce an average of 1,000 words per hour instead of the current benchmark of, let's say, 500, even though the rate per word may halve, we are still earning the same rate per hour.

The problem/opportunity arises because there will be a period in which not everyone will be able to average 1,000 words/hour as they will not have adopted and mastered the technology. Early adopters will earn higher than average hourly rates, late adopters will earn below average rates.

The fact that, under this hypothetical case, clients will potentially receive twice the volume of translation within the same deadline, and for the same price, will be a huge benefit for them, and is likely to lead to them translating more volume. This factor, combined with the ever-increasing volume of translation work required worldwide, means that competent translators are still likely to have enough well-paid work to make remaining in the profession worthwhile.

So, under this scenario, translation is subject to a cycle seen in many other professions/industries:

- practitioners adopt technology that enables them to increase output whilst maintaining quality.
- early adopters of the right technology have an advantage for 3-5 years until everyone else catches up.
- practitioners adopt new technology that enables them to increase output whilst maintaining quality.

In conclusion, I don't see acceptable MT being achieved within 5 or even 10 years, but I do see the benchmark for words/hour rising significantly from the current average of 500 (or whatever it is for each language combination), whilst price per word remains steady or falls.

Just a few thoughts,

Andrew

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Yes ... certainly, Your Billness!

Tsu Dho Nimh — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 03:00:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Tsu Dho Nimh
Post title: Yes ... certainly, Your Billness!

[quote]Barnaby Capeel-Dunn wrote:

Herewith a translation of a short article appearing in the reputable French online journal "Gnration Nouvelles Technologies" ( [url removed] ).

"... Microsoft's founder thinks that within 5 years, the keyboard-voice-wiring on screen combination should revolutionise our way of working,in the same way as SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION WHICH SHOULD COME INTO EFFECT AT THIS TIME (my capitals)".
Oh well, we have been warned!

[Subject edited by staff or moderator 2005-10-10 13:30][/quote]

This from the company that is how many years late with their release of Longhorn/Vista?

Until the grammar checker in MSFT Word can match the average 5th-grader's grammar skill, we have nothing to fear from Microsoft.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | MT and CAT redux

RobinB — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:00:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: RobinB
Post title: MT and CAT redux

[quote]Barnaby Capel-Dunn wrote:
If we accept that CAT is basically a question of harnessing the contents of our hard disk for the purposes of translation, why shouldn't a similar approach covering the whole of the Internet be used in the years ahead? Strides have already been made in this direction, e.g. Transearch.[/quote]

Surely the problem with the current generation of CAT (i.e. TM) applications is that they're essentially dumb systems. Basically, they're nothing more than glorified pattern recognition and matching systems, and their USPs revolve around user-friendliness and price, rather than any significant technological advantages. To put it another way: there aren't any killer apps.

Adding morphology to 1G TM systems would appear to be the logical way forward, but there don't seem to be any serious efforts in this direction (Trados did have such a project, but abandoned it a few years back). Of course, this means developing language pair-specific systems (or modules), which would up the price. But provided the cost/benefit remained at a reasonable level, there would surely be a market (2000 euros for a TM system with integrated grammar rules, anybody?).

Systems like TranSearch are no doubt useful, but they depend on having high quality corpora in the first place. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd have thought that the cross-domain usefulness would be rather limited.

Perhaps we should be demanding more of the CAT manufacturers than merely recycling/repackaging what's essentially 1980s technology.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | EBMT

RobinB — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 20:50:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: RobinB
Post title: EBMT

[quote]Peter Linton wrote:
Internet-based translation, or what is often called Example-based machine translation...

It will perhaps not provide good MT itself, because of the problem of evaluating the quality of the translations found.[/quote]

Well, the concept of EBMT has been around for quite a while now, but the Internet has certainly given it an impetus because of the huge number of parallel corpora now available.

But as you more or less say yourself, the problem here is the age-old one: GIGO. Isn't the UN University trying to develop an EBMT system (possibly together with Google)? How on earth are they going to validate the quality of the source and target documents? Of course, they can't do that, it would take decades, if not centuries.

EBMT might, conceivably, work for extremely narrowly defined subject areas, in a small number of language pairs, where the source texts for translation display a high degree of homogeneity in terms of structure and content (and we're moving towards controlled language here). But you'd still need a dozen or so person-years to validate the reference documents. And by the time you'd done that, the documents would be obsolete...

[Edited at 2005-10-10 21:01]

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Technological progress

Williamson — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 17:14:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Williamson
Post title: Technological progress

I forgot to mention technological progress in the field of robotics. Didn't the Japanese made a female human-alike robot recently? In that field to progress will be made. Once a machine can "understand" language, it can also be programmed to interpret or translate much faster than a human being.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | One Hundred Years of Solitude

Barnaby Capel-Dunn — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:48:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Barnaby Capel-Dunn
Post title: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Point taken, Gabriel. But what proportion of professional translations fall into this category? My guess is that most texts we are required to translate are only too amenable to the sort of advances in technology we have been talking about.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Example-based machine translation

Peter Linton (X) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:28:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Peter Linton (X)
Post title: Example-based machine translation

Barnaby Capel-Dunn raises an important point (see his of MT and CAT) about Internet-based translation, or what is often called Example-based machine translation. That I agree provides a promising avenue for advanced CAT.

It will perhaps not provide good MT itself, because of the problem of evaluating the quality of the translations found. Nevertheless, an interesting area to watch.

Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years? | Stupid box of wires!

Victor Dewsbery — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:16:00 +0000

Forum: Translator resources
Topic: Is this the future? Automatic simultaneous translation within 5 years?
Poster: Victor Dewsbery
Post title: Stupid box of wires!

Try throwing a typo at the compruter and then seehing whatt coms ouit in the wash.

You can spot the deliberate typos in the first sentence (after all, you're a language expert). Your spellchecker will probably spot them, too (although it won't ***really*** know what to do with them). But just try feeding that sentence to your favourite MT system!
Ten points to the MT system that gives you a cheeky look and says "Will you please stop pulling my leg?".

Of course, the MT afficionados will tell you that you must proofread everything in the source language before you feed it through their system, and that you should be gentle with idioms (so my first sentence fails on that count, too).
In other words, the systems are "challenged" if you give them real text to cope with. (When did you last have a source text that didn't contain typos and loosely used language?)

Does anybody here feel threatened?