PaTrans - A MT System: Development and Implementation of and Experiences from a MT-system

PaTrans - a MT-system Development and Implementation of and Experiences from a MT-system Viggo Hansen Lingtech A/S (Denmark) Abstract 1. Background Lingtech A/S (A/S = Inc.) was established by two Danish major patent attorney companies, Hofman- Bang & Boutard A/S and Lehmann & Ree A/S. The background for the formation of the company was the introduction of the European Patents agreement the effect of which was predicted to give a considerable increase in the number of European patents to be validated in Denmark, and consequently had to be translated into Danish. To be able to meet the increased translation work-load, the two companies decided to use any available modern technology to assist in establishing the translation facilities needed. It was further decided to do so in a joint venture to be carried out through Lingtech A/S, a new company formed for the purpose. 2. Market Research A thorough research of available translations systems on the market proved that none of the existing systems could be used for the purpose. Either they were word to word translating systems or they required the presence of an operator during the translation process. Our need was a system which could work as a "translation factory", i.e a continously process of feeding in documents in English resulting in fully translated documents into Danish. It was recognized that the European Commission had considerably translation problems working with ten official languages, and an approach was made to a Danish member of the European Parliament. Through that source we received documentary material stating the level of machine translation efforts carried out by the EEC. It was understood that EEC ran a project EUROTRA under the supervision of the Danish professor Mrs. Bente Maegaard, who in addition was the manager of Center for Language Technology (CLT), an institution under the Danish Minister of Research and Development. An approach to professor Maegaard subsequently resulted in a series of meetings the conclusion of which was that a cooperation between CLT and Lingtech to further investigate the possibilities of developing a purpose-designed system was started. 114 3. Feasibility Study The project was further described and it was decided that the test area should be English - Danish translation of patent documents related to petro-chemistry. A number of patent documents was selected to form the base from which the system requirements should be formulated including vocabulary, morphological-, constituent- and relational-structure. The study should take its platform from the existing EUROTRA-project and result in a recommendation as to the feasibility of implementing a "factory-style translation system". The study lasted about nine months. During that period the system requirements was modified according to the disclosure of actual needs. 4. Conclusion The study concluded that it was possible to construct a system meeting the requirements as described in the background material for the feasibility study. Consequently Lingtech decided to prepare a detailed contract proposal as background for negotiating a contract on the actual development of the system. The contract included - a project description according to …

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