SPANAM® and ENGSPAN® for Windows 2000: an MT pioneer keeps up with technology

SPANAM® and ENGSPAN® for Windows® 2000: An MT Pioneer Keeps up with Technology Marjorie León Pan American Health Organization 525 23rd St., N.W. Washington, DC 20037 leonmarj@paho.org Abstract The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is proud to present the latest release of its fully automatic Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish machine translation systems. SPANAM and ENGSPAN have been ported to the 32-bit Windows platform. The bilingual graphical user interface provides easy access to all the features of the system. The translation engine can be accessed in three different ways: file translation from the desktop or word processing application, sentence translation from within the dictionary update module, or cut-and-paste translation using an ActiveX component. Any user can view all of PAHO's dictionary entries (words, expressions, and rules), and dictionary coders can add new entries of every type and modify all but a small number of protected records. The system is designed to be used by translation professionals in an institutional setting. Administrative utilities include job accounting, dictionary update log, terminology import and export, and dictionary merge. Users can view and print side-by-side listings of source and target texts, lists of not-found words, and the parse of any sentence. Keywords Machine translation; Spanish; English; electronic dictionaries; natural language processing System Requirements The PAHO MT system is a 32-bit Windows application. It runs under Windows 95/98/NT and Windows 2000. Both standalone and LAN versions are available. The full installation requires 100 MB of hard disk storage. A Pentium processor and a minimum of 32MB RAM are required. The software is protected with a hardware security device. User Interface The language of the graphical user interface can be selected at runtime. All menus, dialogs, and help files are available in both English and Spanish, including ToolTips and context-sensitive help. Types of Translation PAHO’s MT system is intended principally for translation of technical and scientific texts. It is also used at PAHO to translate administrative documents, training manuals, and official correspondence. Language combinations The system includes two translation programs: SPANAM which translates from Spanish to English (U.S.) and ENGSPAN which translates from either U.S. or British English to Spanish. File formats The following document formats are accepted and preserved by the system: MS Word 97/2000 and WordPerfect (saved in Rich Text Format), HTML, SGML, and text files. Runtime options The user can select specialized vocabularies (microglossaries) and special grammars. The user can have the program flag those target glosses that are coded as highly reliable and select other special processing features at runtime. . Figure 1: Translation dialog with runtime options Translating test sentences Test sentences can be translated from within the dictionary update module. All the runtime options for file translation are also available in this mode. The linguist or dictionary coder can view the parse of the sentence and ascertain which dictionary entries are being triggered. Translating using the ActiveX component Translation can also be done from within MS Word by highlighting short segments of the text and clicking a button on the PAHO translation …

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