SYSTRAN: A machine translation system to meet user needs

It is fitting that we should open this session on commercial machine translation systems with a presentation on Systran, a pioneer among MT systems, whose users and developers are best characterized by their shared persistent belief in the proposition that machine translation is feasible -and not only feasible, but practical and useful. It is very encouraging to look around me today and see how many of you have indicated by your presence at this conference that you share this belief. Because Systran developers have always had as a goal the production of useful translations -and because Systran has been a production system since 1969 -I would like to focus my talk on the five qualities that make a system useful: speed, reasonable cost, accuracy, accessibility, and flexibility. As a brief introduction to Systran, I would like to quote from Prof. Juan Sager's closing remarks at the World Systran Conference held in February, 1986, in which he stated that Systran "is used more widely and by a greater range of users for a larger diversity of purposes than any other system currently in use. " This statement alone bears witness to the fact that Systran has already met the above 5 criteria for a wide variety of users, ranging from large organizations, like the U.S. Air Force, NASA, the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), Xerox Corporation and General Motors of Canada, who sponsored so much of the early system development, to the many new users who today access Systran through on-line terminals and service bureaus. Systran was developed by LATSEC, Inc. and World Translation Center, Inc. in La Jolla, California; today there are additional development groups in Luxembourg, Paris and Tokyo. Systran now offers 15 operational language pairs. These include English into 8 languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese and Dutch; French into English, German and Dutch; and Russian, German, Japanese and Spanish into English. English-Arabic is under development, while pilot systems exist for 6 other language pairs: German into French, Spanish and Italian; and Chinese, Portuguese and Italian into English. The subject fields covered are already too numerous to list here, while document types range from abstracts, technical reports, journal articles, and service manuals to minutes of meetings and newspaper articles, with the range of linguistic styles increasing dramatically as many new users gain access to Systran. Speed: Translations 4 to Many Times Faster Depending on End Use In speaking about the features that make Systran the most widely-used MT system in the world today, I could begin by quoting such statistics as the fact that Systran, because its basic software is written in IBM 360/370 assembly language, can translate up to 2 million words per CPU hour on the FACOM M-380, which is used in Japan for translations between English and Japanese. Clearly 2 million words per hour is very impressive, especially by comparison with human output of approximately 2,000 words per day or even with the second fastest Japanese system, which translates at 60,000 words per hour on the same machine. But, although impressive, such statistics are largely irrelevant, because what makes any system of translation useful is how fast it can get a finished document into the hands of an end user in the form in which the end user wants it. Therefore, we might find it more interesting to examine the statement of a Systran user at the European Commission, who says that a final copy of a post-