Software Tools for the Environment of a Computer Aided Translation System

SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT OF A COMPUTER AIDED TRANSLATION SYSTEM I Daniel BACHUT - Nelson VERASTEGUI IFCI GETA INPG, 46, av. F~lix-Viallet Universit~ de Grenoble 3803] Grenoble C~dex 38402 Saint-Martin-d'H~res FRANCE FRANCE ABSTRACT In this paper we will present three systems, ATLAS, THAM and VISULEX, which have been designed and implemented at GETA (Study Group for Machine Translation) in collaboration with IFCI (Institut de Formation et de Conseil en Informatique) as tools operating around the ARIANE-78 system. We will describe in turn the basic characteristics of each system, their possibilities, actual use, and performance. I - INTRODUCTION ARIANE-T8 is a computer system designed to offer an adequate environment for constructing machine translation programs, for running them, and for (humanly) revising the rough translations produced by the computer. It has been used for a number of applications (Russian and Japanese, English to French and Malay, Portuguese to English) and has been constantly been amended to meet the needs of the users[Ch. BOITET et al., 1982].In this paper, we will present three software tools for this environment which have been requested by the systemts users. II - ATLAS ATLAS is an Kid to the linguist for introdu- cing new words and their associated codes into a coded dictionary of a Computer Aided Translation (CAT) application. Previously, linguists used indexing manuals when adding new words to dictionaries. These manuals contained indexing charts, sorts of graphs enabling the search for the linguistic code asso- ciated with a given lexical unit in a particular linguistic application. The choice of one path in a chart is the result of successive choices made at each node. This may be represented by associating questions to each node and the possible answers to the arcs coming from a node ; the leaves of the tree bear the name of the code and an example. A language to write the "indexing charts" is provided to the linguist. An ATLAS session begins with an optional compilation phase. Then, the system functions in a conversational way in order to execute commands. The main functions of ATLAS are the following : - Editing and updating of indexing charts : compi- lation of an external form of the chart, and modification of the internal form through inte- raction with the user, with the possibility of returning a new external form. - Interpretation of these charts, in order to obtain the linguistic codes and the indexing of dictionaries. A chart is interpreted like a menu, so that the user can traverse the charts answering the questions. He can also view the code found, or any other code, by request, and examine and update the dictionary by writing the code in the correct field of the current record. - Visualisation of charts in a tree-like form in order to build the indexing manuals. In the case of interpretation, the screen is handling as a whole by the system : it manages several fields such as the dictionary field, the chart field and the command field. …

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