A taste of MALT

MT Summit VIII Santiago de Compostela (Spain), 18 - 22 September 2001 A Taste of MALT Ulrike Bernardi, Petra Gieselmann, Steve McLaughlin SAIL Labs GmbH Balanstrasse 57 81541 Munich Germany ulrike.bernardi@sail-labs.de, petra.gieselmann@sail-labs.de, steve.mclaughlin@sail-labs.de Abstract Globalisation is bringing translation and multilingual information processing to areas where it was previously unknown or relatively unimportant. Today, translation is not only important for reaching global audiences, it is becoming an indispensable component inside other systems and workflows. MALT (Modular Architecture for Linguistic Tools) represents a fresh approach to a relatively new problem; how to provide translation capabilities plus any other vital linguistic tools and components inside a common framework, possibly together with other external applications. MALT’s modular structure and multi-tier architecture simplify integration into complex workflow scenarios, and the functional separation in the MALT interface permits new components to be added extremely quickly. The applications and components running under MALT can be accessed locally, in a network environment or as engines of a distributed client-server system such as DTS. Keywords Integration, Distributed Architecture, Modularity, CORBA, Java Introduction: The Need for a New Concept Globalisation is undoubtedly changing the face of business. And one of the main problems globalisation brings with it is how surmount the very real language barriers which divide the peoples of the world. What should have been obvious from the very beginning is now finally being widely recognised - English will never be universally accepted as the sole vehicle of international communication. And rightly so - for hundreds of political, cultural and educational reasons. The only way forward for global players is to be capable of understanding information and providing content in all the native languages of the targeted countries. The upshot of all this is that language is now an important element in applications where it was previously unimportant. Translation is and always will be a goal in itself, and is an important line of business. But translation and translation-related activities (such as multilingual information retrieval) now play a secondary but vital role in an ever-widening range of other commercial activities. It is obvious that this is very different to the way translation and linguistic tools have been used up to now. The classical problem, large enough in itself, was how to get documents into a particular dedicated processing system and how to get the results out. Now the nature of the problem has changed. The new challenge is to build translation and linguistic processing capacity into many different types of workflow. Texts are no longer coming to the translation system - the translation system is coming to the texts! Piecemeal and one-off integration of linguistic tools into applications is not the correct approach to this new problem. We need a universal solution - one that can be used for a multitude of tasks ranging from classical Machine Translation and Translation Memory systems right through to applications which need linguistics in a supporting role. This is where MALT (Modular Architecture for Linguistic Tools) comes in. Essentially, MALT represents the framework …

Content truncated to 500 words