Network-based Machine Translation Services

EAMT Workshop, TKE’96, Vienna, Austria, 29 - 30 August 1996. Proceedings 147 Network-based Machine Translation Services Dr. Jörg Schütz Abstract The emerging network technologies such as Intranets and the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web (WWW), will create a new model of computing which I will call Network Computing (NC); others, e.g. Forrester Research Inc. call it Internet Computing with the obvious stress on the Internet. Recent analyses of this emerging market conclude that Network Computing: • Extends and improves client/server technology. • Will be used by companies to build new customer connections. • Will change the structure of the industry and the role of information technology as well as the role of language technology. The focus of my presentation will be multilingual language technology and includes the following aspects: • What is Network Computing? • How Network Computing will emerge. • How Network Computing will change the industry. • What this means to vendors. • Impact on users. I will limit these aspects primarily to network-based translation services, which comprise translation on demand, multilingual communication, multilingual information search and retrieval, as well as customisable translation engines. For details on Dr. Jörg Schütz and the IAI, please refer to Session 5 cover page. 148 EAMT Workshop, TKE’96, Vienna, Austria, 29 - 30 August 1996. Proceedings 0. Introduction In order to thrive in the next millennium industries will have to overcome the confusing revolutions introduced by business and technological areas. On the one hand, the business revolution is characterized by increased competitiveness, the pressure to reduce costs, increased productivity and an increase of responsiveness; on the other hand, the technological revolution concerns the step-wise deployment of distributed systems, PCs, client/server technology, graphical user interfaces (GUI) and open systems. Currently, significant reengineering efforts are underway to taming the complexity of both business processes and computer information systems. The information systems that are needed for tomorrow’s global markets must be far more robust, intelligent and user-centered than the data processing systems of today. With the increasing global competition of trade and industry, multilinguality is an additional asset of future information systems, particularly in combination with the ubiquitous information networks (or information highways) that form the digital foundation of the information society (personally I prefer to talk about the knowledge society, cf. below). Just as quantum physics and the relativity theory have changed the thinking of how to describe nature (particularly the recent works of Hawking and Penrose summarized in [Hawking & Penrose, 1996]), the Internet and its multimedial extension, the World Wide Web (WWW or Web), have changed the way of thinking about human communication and the world’s globalisation in general (and of course we have the same problems of what this is all about). Today, we are still faced with the Babel threat, especially when we are surfing on the Internet. Therefore the myth of Star Trek’s universal translator is alive more than ever, especially because past experiences, in particular the various evaluation and validation projects, have shown that current machine translation …

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