Utilization of Machine Translation

[MT Summit IV, July 20-22, 1993, Kobe, Japan] Utilization of Machine Translation in Malaysia Dr. Ahmad Zaki Abu Bakar Malaysian National Institute of Translation Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA Abstract This paper is a country report of the current progress of the research and development efforts in machine translation in Malaysia with emphasis on the work being carried out at the Malaysian National Institute of Translation. 1 Introduction 1.1. Malaysian MT Centers Malaysia's involvement in machine translation started in the early 1980's with the establishment of its first machine translation center at the University of Science, Malaysia or USM in Penang. The center at USM was developed from collaborative research efforts with the University of Grenoble of France to build an English-Malay machine translation system. Later, USM moved to build computer- aided translation systems and the pursuance of other related machine translation studies through its own efforts [Zaharin'92]. The second Malaysian machine translation center emerged at the University of Technology, Malaysia or UTM in Kuala Lumpur. Based on a research and development laboratory working on natural language processing which started in 1981, the Computer Translation Unit later became the secretariat and main laboratory for the KANTA Project. 1.2. UTM MT Efforts The KANTA Project is the Malaysian portion of the multilingual machine translation research project jointly carried out between Japan, Kingdom of Thailand, Republic of Indonesia, People's Republic of China and Malaysia. The project is better known as the CICC Machine Translation Project due to the Japanese Center of the International Cooperation in Computerization's role as the coordinator of the project. Since 1987, Malaysia and the other four member countries have been attempting to develop an interlingua-based machine translation system. The first phase of the project officially ended at the end of March 1993. A prototype machine translation system which is capable of translating sentences in the national languages of the five member countries was able to be constructed. Apart from the KANTA Project, the Computer Translation Unit at UTM is also pursuing other projects. A major ongoing project is the development of an English-Malay translation system through a joint research with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). The project which started in 1990 is partially supported by the British Council and the Malaysian Research and Scientific Development Council. UTM too has its own MT projects. Among the projects classified as national projects are a software to translate formal letters called LETRA [A.Zaki & Hapidah 91] and a software to translate Malay cooking recipes [A.Zaki 92]. 2 Malaysian MT Plans 2.1. Kanta Project Phase Two As announced by the Honourable Minister of Education of Malaysia at the Third Verification Test organised by CICC in Tokyo on 15 December 1992, the Malaysian Government has consented to an extension phase of two years for the cooperative machine translation project with Japan. During this phase, the prototype machine translation system will be improved in all aspects to enable its performance to be better or at par with commercial machine translation systems. …

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