Experiment report of a commercial machine translation in a manufacturing industry domain

MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 Experiment Report of a Commercial Machine Translation in a Manufacturing Industry Domain Orie Fukutomi School of Languages and European Studies University of Wolverhampton Stafford St. Wolverhampton WV1 1SB UK O.Fukutomi@wlv.ac.uk Keywords: user study, commercial machine translation, industry domain Abstract The aim of this paper is to provide a report of an experiment using a Commercial Machine Translation (CMT) software in a manufacturing company in the UK, with particular reference to Japanese / English Machine translation. It presents the main difficulties involved in the translation of industrial documents from Japanese to English, and discusses how the productivity and quality of translation can be improved through the use of commercial Machine Translation (MT) software. This is an empirical data and is proposed from translators' point of view in a manufacturing factory. The survey focuses on a manufacturing organisation which does not have the resources needed to develop their own MT system. The globalization of the Japanese manufacturing industry makes it necessary for the translation of manuals and other documents to be as rapid as possible. In this paper, linguistic features of both English and Japanese are discussed from the evaluation experiment in order to make up writing rules for members of staff at Makita Manufacturing Europe. It also discusses viewpoint of British engineers when translated manuals are read. 0. Outline Structure The quality of translations generated by MT often disappoints users and it even makes them stop using it for serious documentation. Although it is still impossible for MT to process natural language completely, the level achieved is significant Yet, not many users are informed about the properties or strengths of MT. In this paper, one Commercial Machine Translation software package, Honyaku Adapter II (HAII) from NEC, has been chosen in order to demonstrate how it can be utilised in a medium- sized company, Makita Manufacturing Europe Ltd.(MME), where there is no translation department. The author chose test sets from a Japanese organisation, Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (JEIDA). [Isahara, 95] However, this particular experiment only focuses on the manufacturing domain, and its language can be a sublanguage. As can be seen from the example below, test sets are not particularly relevant to the evaluation of sentences from the manufacturing domain. Thus, instead of using actual sentences from JEJDA’s test sets for the evaluation, the author used the test sets’ categories for a CMT to translate actual texts from MME. In this way, the result of the evaluation offers immediate feedback to manufacturing companies that require translation services. The experiment procedure is as follows; Firstly five hundred twenty eight Japanese sentences are chosen from the typical types of document held by Makita Manufacturing Europe Ltd. (MME ), and then these were translated - 579- MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 using the Commercial Machine Translation software, HAII. Secondly, an evaluation was carried out using criteria from JEIDA’s test sets. In this paper, linguistic features of both English and Japanese are discussed from the evaluation experiment in orderto make …

Content truncated to 500 words