A Successful Case of Computer Aided Translation

A Successful Case of Computer Aided Translation Miguel Filgueiras LIACC, Universidade do Porto R. do Campo Alegre 823, 4100 Porto, Portugal mig©ncc, up. pt Abstract This paper reports on the techniques used to successfully translate with the help of a computer a Mathematics textbook from Portuguese to English. Even if these techniques are simple and this case has some peculiarities, it seems that the same method will be useful in other cases as well, and, more importantly, that this experi- ence is a good motivation for some research to be done on the possible refinements of the method. 1 Introduction This paper reports on the techniques used to suc- cessfully translate with the help of a computer a Mathematics textbook from Portuguese to English. These techniques, although quite simple, proved to be surprisingly effective. In fact, for a 400 pages book, the amount of work required from the trans- lator (the author of the book himself) was equivalent to that of typing a few 40 pages. Even if the book subject matter and the pair of languages have some peculiarities, it seems that the same method will be useful in other cases as well, and, more importantly, that this experience is a good motivation for some research to be done on the possible refinements of the method. 2 The Problem The work I am about to describe originated in the question "Which Machine Translation system should I use to translate my book from Portuguese into En- glish?". To which the only fair answer from anyone acquainted with the current state of the art of Ma- chine Translation ought to be a (maybe qualified) "None!". The book in question is Semigrupos Fini- tose Algebra Universal, a textbook on finite semi- group theory. The problem was then reformulated as "What may help me in avoiding to type in all the 400 pages of the book, given that it is a book on Mathematics and was prepared in IbTEX?". A book on Mathe- matics meant that the language used was somewhat formal and that all mathematical formulas could be preserved during the translation. That the book has been prepared in I_$TEX , a text processor widely used by mathematicians and computer scientists (Lain- port, 1986), meant that it would be possible to use the IbTEX commands in the text, for instance, to de- tect the boundaries of formulas (the same would be true of texts encoded using a mark-up language like, for instance, SGML). This far less ambitious goal of building some tools that would help the translation seemed quite attainable, even if at the time the final result was not expected to be as good as it turned out to be. 3 The Method The basic method employed consists in having a dic- tionary of rewrite rules, each one being a sequence of words in Portuguese with its counterpart in English, and in applying these rules to the source text. The dictionary is looked up from the beginning so that the first …

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