BEYTrans: A Free Online Collaborative Wiki-Based CAT Environment Designed for Online Translation Communities

BEYTrans: A Free Online Collaborative Wiki-Based CAT Environment Designed for Online Translation Communities* Youcef Beya,b, Kyo Kageurab, and Christian Boiteta aLaboratoire LIG-GETALP, L’Université Joseph Fourier, 385, rue de la Bibliothèque. Grenoble, France.{youcef.bey, christian.boitet}@imag.fr bGraduate School of Education The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, 113-0033,Tokyo, Japan.kyo@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp Abstract. This paper introduces BEYTrans (Better Environment for Your TRANSlation), the first experimental environment for free online collaborative computer-aided translation. The requirements and functionalities related to individual translators and communities of translators are distinguished and described. These functionalities have been integrated in a Wiki-based complete environment, equipped with all currently possible asynchronous linguistic resources and translation aids. Functions provided by BEYTrans are also compared with existing CAT systems and ongoing experiments are discussed. Keywords: Language Resources, Computer-Aided Translation Tools, Translation Memory, Segmentation, Collaborative Translation, Volunteer Translation Communities, Wiki. 1. Introduction Multilingual information exchange is rapidly increasing on the Internet. A substantial part of this multilingualization is carried out by volunteers (engaged in the translation of documents, articles, reports, etc. as well as the translation/localization of computer software). Many online translation communities are formed by translators, software engineers, and in general people sharing the same motivations and aims. In view of this, various useful projects for online translation communities have emerged. Yakushite.Net is one such example. In Yakushite.Net, the system aims to improve machine translation (MT) performance through the interaction with volunteer translators. Translators contributing in turn can take advantage of MT and other functions provided by Yakushite.Net, while they contribute to the improvement of the system by augmenting its language resources (YAKUSHITE, 2007). Open environments for developing free online lexical resources also exist. Wiktionary – The linguistic companion of the huge free Wikipedia encyclopedia – is one example (WIKTIONARY, 2007). Papillon, another example, aims also to construct a large-scale, free multilingual lexical database with the help of volunteers (Mangeot, 2002). In addition, free * Acknowledgements: Special thanks go to the DEMGOL organizers at Trieste (Italy), in particular Mr. Giovanni Zorzetti, who helped us to transfer hundreds of multilingual documents by developping special scripts, and Ms. Francesca Marzari, who has devoted much time and effort to evaluating and testing BEYTrans in a real-world environment. * This research is partly supported by grant-in-aid (A) 17200018 “Construction of online multilingual reference tools for aiding translators” by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS). © Copyright 2007 by Alfred Hofmann, Ursula Barth, Ingrid Beyer, Christine Günther, Frank Holzwarth, Anna Kramer, and Erika Siebert-Cole 87 standalone translation memory (TM) systems such as Omega-T are now available (OMEGAT, 2007). While appreciating the importance of these online environments and systems for directly or indirectly promoting the multilingual exchange of information, we recognize the lack of an integrated environment to help online translator communities in a systematic way. Against this backdrop, a free online computer-aided translation (CAT) environment, BEYTrans (Better Environment for Your TRANSlation) has been developed, and the system is now in its experimental stage. This first experimental version has two levels of functionality. The first level corresponds to …

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