An Interactive Translation Support Facility for Non-Professional Users

An Interactive Translation Support Facility for Non-Professional Users YAMABANA Kiyoshi, MURAKI Kazunori, KAMEI Shin-ichiro, SATOH Kenji, DOI Shinichi, TAMURA Shinko Information Technology Research Laboratories NEC Corporation Miyazaki 4-1-1, Miyamae-ku, Kawasaki 216, JAPAN {yamabana, k-muraki, kamei, satoh, doi, shinko}~hum.cl.nec.co.jp Abstract We present an interactive translation method to support non-professional users to write an original document. The method, combining dictionary lookup func- tion and user-guided stepwise interactive machine translation, allows the user to ob- tain clear result with an easy operation. We implemented the method as an English writing support facility that serves as a translation support front-end to an arbi- trary application. 1 Introduction With the steady decrease of network communica- tion cost and equipment prices, world-wide com- puter networks and the number of its users are growing very rapidly. However, there is a large obstacle against global communication over net- works, namely the language barrier, especially for non English-speaking people. This is a major reason personal EJ (English to Japanese) machine transla- tion systems are gaining popularity in Japan. They help the user to quickly grasp the content of web pages, by providing rough translation. Since speed and lexical coverage are most important require- ments, conventional automatic machine translation systems developed so far are useful for this purpose. Contrary to the EJ direction, the major task in JE (Japanese to English) direction will be writing short original documents, such as e-mail. The most impor- tant requirement will be translation quality, because the reader is usually different from the MT user. To control quality, some kind of human interaction will be inevitable. However, interactive support for conventional MT systems doesn't seem suitable for these users, since they are primarily intended for professional translators. Their post-editing function often requires working in a special environment that requires special training. An interactive, easy-to- use translation support facility, targeted for non- professional translators, is desirable. We may expect that these users have basic knowl- edge and ability to read and understand English. This expectation is natural and realistic in a coun- try like Japan, where all high-school graduates are supposed to have completed six year course in En- glish. Their reading skill and grammar knowledge is usually enough to judge the quality of current MT systems, but they may need help from MT systems when browsing the Internet. For the JE direction, they will not be satisfied with the raw output of con- ventional MT systems, but it will be too laborious to write down English sentence from scratch. For these users, online dictionaries have been used be- cause of the reliability of the result. However, in spite of abundant information within the dictionary such as inflection, verbal case frame, idioms and so on, the only electronically available part is spelling of translation equivalents (through copy & paste). Other information is only presented to be read as in the case of a paper dictionary, with all further work left to the user. In this article, we present an interactive trans- lation method and its implementation, …

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