tekom-Jahrestagung 2012 - ActiveDoc

International Management
MT systems including Google are rooted in SMT for the most part. It is
apparent that SMT is a quite advanced technology that shows how the
computer automatically learns the knowledge of translation and makes
its own translations. SMT has a strong point that it is able to perform
domain customization rapidly, if provided with sufficient corpus. Then,
why is it impossible for SMT to substitute human translation? The reasons
lie in its inferior translation quality and the inability of making
“perfect lies” required occasionally for translation, as well as its technological
characteristics that make it difficult for human to participate in
and have a delicate control.
Our expectation for the MT system is very clear: inexpensive and rapid
post editing, high-quality translation, cost reduction, and easy implementation
of the custom engine appropriate for the specific domain or
customer. Additionally, it is required to ensure consistency in translation,
immediate participation of human translators or project managers,
and real-time quality improvement through active learning. I would like
to show how these requirements apply to the recent MT systems in this
presentation.
The development of the MT systems for Asian languages began in Japan
and Korea at the beginning of 1980. The focus of the development was
on translation between English and Japanese or between English and
Korea. However, high quality enough for commercial application was
not ensured until the 2000s. Machine translation between Japanese and
Korean showed 95% of accuracy with regard to the translation quality at
the beginning of 2000, due to their similar language structures. So it was
actually employed in various commercial services. The most popular
language spoken worldwide is Chinese. Almost 15% of the world population
is speaking Chinese, which amounts to the sum of the population
using English, Spanish, and Hindi. The recent development of translation
technologies is focused on translation from Chinese to Japanese,
Korean, and English. However, satisfactory quality of translation seems
a long way away. This presentation will introduce its specific cases,
translation quality, and commercial application.
Practical MTs for Technical Communication
It is obvious that MT will be employed for the larger range of the Technical
Communication (TC) industry. But the problem is how to employ
insufficient quality of translation and the hard-to-handle MT system in
the actual translation work. In this presentation, we will introduce the
application system based on various MTs that Saltlux, Inc. has developed
and applied for the past 20 years, and explain how to achieve practical
quality at a reasonable cost. Especially, Saltlux, as a representative
Multi-Language Vendor (MLV) in Asia, is providing high-quality human
translation services. Saltlux aims to not only share the experience and
vision in bringing about innovation in the translation industry through
collaboration of machine and human. But it also searches for and expands
the service for new groups of customers. To help your understanding,
we will demonstrate the hybrid machine translation platform
linked to the social network, and show the mobile translation capable of
voice input and output.
tekom-Jahrestagung 2012
93