FAMT is alive and well

MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 FAMT IS ALIVE AND WELL Marjorie León Chief, Translation Services 525 23rd Street, N.W. Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Washington, DC, 20037 USA leonmarj@paho.org Abstract This invited talk describes the use of fully automatic machine translation (FAMT) at the Pan American Health Organization. Statistics covering 1998 are presented and analyzed in terms of productivity and cost savings. Feedback from several outside users of PAHO's translation software is also reported. Problems encountered in implementing machine translation in an international organization are discussed from the points of view of managers, translators, and end users. The talk concludes with a quick glimpse at what PAHO's MT development staff has been working on this year. Introduction In April of this year, I attended the meeting of the Joint Inter-Agency Committee on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology (JIAMCATT) in Geneva, Switzerland. The group fosters discussions and exchanges between members of language services units. United Nations agencies are facing serious budget restrictions these days, and managers have zeroed in on translation as one area where costs might be cut. This year's JIAMCATT meeting focused on computer tools such as translation memory, terminology data banks, and speech recognition systems. Those tools are designed to be operated in real-time by a live translator. PAHO's fully automatic machine translation system was the exception. Many members of the group had long since lost interest in FAMT, and they were surprised to learn that PAHO was using it successfully. 1 Why Does MT Work at PAHO? Why does MT work at the Pan American Health Organization when most other international organizations haven't been able to make it work? I would like to try to shed some light on this question. Let me mention some of the key ingredients of our success. They are not listed in order of priority, because they are all essential parts of the picture. Our Own Software PAHO uses its own proprietary MT software: Spanish to English (SPANAM®) and English to Spanish (ENGSPAN®). The software is maintained and enhanced by our staff computational linguists. The program has been tuned to the types of text we usually encounter, and we can introduce improvements and fix problems when the need arises. Management Commitment After about 10 years of in-house software development, a controlled experiment showed that the quality of postedited MT was acceptable and that MT had the potential to produce cost savings through increased productivity. In order to realize this potential, PAHO's Director approved a general directive in 1989 which established MT as the primary mode of translation to be used by Translation Services. This commitment has been reconfirmed this year; the revised translation policy now provides for use of MT by the technical and administrative units at Headquarters and in our field offices. Electronic Input Our policy requires that the units requesting translation services provide an electronic copy of the text, whenever possible. Since much of our work is generated by PAHO staff, and the same word- processing software is used throughout the …

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