Minna no Hon’yaku: A website for hosting,archiving, and promoting translations
Masao Utiyama† , Takeshi Abekawa‡ , Eiichiro Sumita† and Kyo Kageura§†

1

MASTAR Project, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan{mutiyama,eiichiro.sumita}@nict.go.jp‡
Center for Informatics of Association, National Institute of Informatics, Japanabekawa@nii.ac.jp§
Graduate School of Education, University of Tokyo, Japankyo@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Introduction

In accordance with the rapid growth in the amount of information available in a variety oflanguages on the Web, translation needs and activities are sharply increasing. Many NGOs andNPOs that have been involved in translation as part of their activities since the pre-internet
era have stepped up their translation activities; groups that were not previously involved intranslation have started translating information related to their activities; online multilingual
civic news sites have ﬂourished; and a growing number of individuals have started translating
online documents of their choice, in part or in full. Software localisation has come to constitute animportant element in the distribution of software, and has become publicly visible due especiallyto the growth of free software.
Several notable features can be identiﬁed in the recent development of translation activities.
One is the growth in the translation of online texts. This trend has gained impetus with therecent increase in the number of documents available under Creative Commons licenses, whichhelps promote the translation of online texts under clear licenses. A second feature is that onlinetranslation is mostly done by volunteer translators, who do not necessarily have expertise intranslation. A third is that these translators rely heavily on dictionaries and Google search whentranslating. A fourth is that most of these translators do not use translation-aid tools. Finally,a ﬁfth feature is that translation by volunteers has become an important source of providing
unbiased or alternative information in an era of media concentration.
Against this backdrop, we have developed an integrated translation aid and hosting website,“Minna no Hon’yaku” (“Translation of/for/by everyone”; henceforth MNH), and made it publicly available since April 2009 at http://trans-aid.jp. The underlying concept of MNH is tomake humans more intelligent by making machines more intelligent, and vice versa. MNH has
two aspects: (i) a translation aid aspect that includes mechanisms for aiding online translatorsand facilitating the development of online translator communities by promoting inter-translator
communication and collaboration; and (ii) a public media aspect that includes publishing translated information on the site and archiving translations with their originals. Section 2 of thisFigure 1. The top page of MNH
paper introduces the translation hosting aspect of MNH, and section 3 details the built-in translation aid editor QRedit. In section 4, we explain the community building functions as well as
the educational functions provided by MNH. Section 5 describes the system’s reference sources,
and section 6 introduces its current state of usage. Section 7 concludes the paper.

2

MNH as a translation hosting site

2.1

Viewing documents

MNH provides information to those who access the MNH site looking for information. This is thesame as any other news service or blog site. The only diﬀerence is that the information provided
in MNH consists of translated documents. Figure 1 shows the MNH top page, which appears
when internet users access the site. Anybody can read the translated documents published on
the MNH site.
The main column in the centre provides contains newly uploaded translations; the right-handcolumn contains translations of “today’s featured article” and “today’s featured picture” fromthe English Wikipedia site [1]. The left-hand column provides a variety of information for users,
i.e. how to use the MNH site, experimental use of QRedit, a link to the registration page, aFigure 2. A personal user space in MNHlogin box for registered users, and a list of translators who have recently published translations
on MNH.
To navigate users to relevant documents, four sets of tags are displayed above the threecolumns: tags assigned to newly published translations; thematic tags; area tags; and genre
tags. These tags are assigned by translators when they publish their translations on MNH.
MNH provides a ﬁxed number of pre-deﬁned thematic, area and genre tags. In addition to thesetags, translators can create their own tags. Users can also assign bookmark tags to publishedtranslations, which facilitates user-oriented organisation of translations on MNH.

2.2

Hosting translations

As a translation hosting site, MNH enables users to edit, store and publish their translations on
MNH through their web browsers. In order to use these functions, one needs to obtain an MNH
user account, which is free and open to anybody. Users can choose to remain anonymous, as MNH
allows users to use pseudonyms. Registered users are provided with their own personal space,Figure 3. The popup window that asks users for the copyright status of a documentin the same manner as ordinary blog services. Users can edit their personal information; makedirectories to manage translations; and make use of a variety of translation-aid and community
building functions, etc. Figure 2 shows an image of a user’s personal space when logged in.
The main diﬀerences between MNH and blog sites are:
1. As MNH is designed to host hosting translated documents, the documents that registeredusers publish are translations. Users make translations using the integrated translation-aid
environment QRedit, the details of which will be explained in the next section. When users
save their translations with permission to publish, they are published on MNH.
2. Translations made by users are published on the MNH top page. Unlike blog sites, thepersonal pages of registered users are not explicitly designed for the publication of theirtranslations, although anyone can access the personal page of a registered user by inputting
their user name as follows: http://trans-aid.jp/users/?user_id=USER_NAME.
Further, unlike most blog sites, individual users cannot change the design of their own
space.
The clariﬁcation of copyright is a critical issue in hosting and publishing translated documents. Though it is users who take responsibility for copyright issues, MNH introduces threesteps to make sure that users respect copyright. First, in the process of registration, users must
agree to terms of use that request them to abide by copyright laws. Second, when users open
QRedit to translate a document, MNH asks them to conﬁrm that they follow copyright laws.
Unless users agree, they cannot open QRedit (though they can elect to make a general agreement
the ﬁrst time they use QRedit so that they can open it without this step from then on). Third,
when users save a translation, the system requires the clariﬁcation of the copyright status of theoriginal document. MNH ﬁrst asks whether the author of the original document permits the publication of translations. If users answer “yes”, then a popup window appears. Figure 3 shows the
popup window. In this window, users specify the copyright status, among the alternatives given

by MNH: Creative Commons BY, BY=SA, BY=NC, BY=NC=SA, GNU Free Documentation
Licence, and others. Users then need to choose whether they want to publish the translation or
keep it private (there is also a third choice, which we will elaborate on in section 4).
Translations of documents whose copyright permits the publication of translations are madepublicly available on the MNH top page (as shown in Figure 1) when translators choose to publish
the translations, while other translations made using QRedit on MNH are restricted to personaluse or to use among a limited group of users. We will come back to the mode of limited use in
section 4, in relation to the community-building functions of MNH.

3

QRedit: An integrated translation-aid editor

3.1

Needs of online volunteer translators

Volunteer translators involved in translating online documents have varied backgrounds. Someare professional translators volunteering part-time, some are interested in the topic, and sometranslate as a part of their NGO activities. They nonetheless share several basic characteristics:
1. They are native speakers of the target language (TL), which is mostly the case for any sortof translator;
2. Many do not have a native-level command of the source language (SL);
3. Most do not use translation aid systems or MT, because (i) most of these are commercial
products that are too expensive for volunteer translators, and (ii) they are not readily
accessible online;
4. They want to reduce the subjective burden involved in the process of translation. The
reduction of time is also very important but perhaps less important for volunteer translators
than for professional translators;
5. They spend a large amount of their translation time (about 30 to 60 per cent) looking up
reference sources such as dictionaries or Google (cf. [2]);6. The smallest basic unit of translation is perceived as a paragraph, not a sentence, and “ata glance” readability of the SL text is very important.
These traits deﬁne the basic features that any usable translation editor should provide foronline volunteer translators:
1. It should be accessible online, through Web browsers;
2. It should provide high-quality dictionaries and an interface that promotes translators’
awareness of dictionary entries for diﬃcult expressions, so that they do not overlook, forexample, idiomatic expressions [3];3. It should provide a connection to Internet resources and should enable Internet searches tobe initiated seamlessly from the translation editor environment;
4. It should provide a functional line of ﬂow and interface that enables translators to maintainthe rhythm of translation while using necessary functions such as dictionary lookup and
Google search.

Figure 4. QRedit as it appears after start-up

3.2

Features of QRedit

QRedit has been developed as a translation-aid editor that provides various support functions
to online translators based on the aforementioned requirements [3]. The user can open QRedit
simply by clicking the QRedit start button, which appears immediately below the top banner ofthe MNH page when the user is logged in (see Figure 2). The user can either specify the URLof the document that s/he wishes to translate before clicking the start button or copy-and-paste
the source document after opening QRedit. Figure 4 shows an image of QRedit after it has been
opened. At this stage, (i) the bibliographic information area appears at the top of the windowand (ii) dictionary lookup is activated in the source text area (which is on the left in Figure
4; users can rearrange the position of these areas). The bibliographic information area can beclosed to enable the user to take full advantage of the screen for translating the document. Boththe source and target text areas are divided into paragraph units. Scrolling of the source andtarget areas can be synchronised for both directions or from one to the other direction.
In the process of translation, translators can look up information by clicking words or phrases
in the source text area. Figure 4 shows how dictionary lookup appears. When the user clicks alexical token in the source text area, a small popup window appears, which displays translations
from a high-quality dictionary provided by Sanseido [4], a few free dictionaries, and bilingual
entries from Wikipedia (we will return to this point in section 5). Translation sentence pairs
automatically collected from the Web and also provided by some NGO/NPO groups are alsoavailable for lookup [5], though not through the small popup window but by activating thesentence lookup session.

In addition to a simple dictionary lookup, QRedit also provides a ﬂexible idiom/multi-wordunit lookup mechanism. For instance, it can automatically look up the dictionary entry “withone’s tongue in one’s cheek” for the expression “He said that with his big fat tongue in his big
fat cheek” or “head screwed on right” for “head screwed on wrong” [6].
QRedit provides a stratiﬁed reference lookup interface, which distinguishes three user awareness levels depending on the type and nature of the reference unit. These awareness levels are
reﬂected in the way the reference units are displayed, for example, change in the background color
or the use of an underline. The diﬀerent awareness levels are assigned to reference units from avariety of reference sources, according to the criteria of “composition”, “diﬃculty”, “specialty”
and “resource type” [7].
Starting from this small popup window, the user can trigger four types of action, corresponding to “P”, “L”, “S” and “R” shown on the top line of the popup window. In “P” mode (which isthe default, though users can change their default settings), the user can paste any string in the
popup window into the target text area by clicking it. If the user chooses “L” and then clicks thesource language entry, a new, larger window appears, in which the full dictionary information isavailable. “S” mode enables the user to activate Google search by clicking a string in the small
popup window. “R” activates the function of registering user deﬁned translations.
Keyboard control remains ﬁxed on the target text area, even when the user activates dictionary lookup by clicking source text tokens in the source text area using the mouse. This enables
the user to maintain the rhythm of translation and focus on the making of target texts.
In an informal preliminary experiment, we observed two major eﬀects of using QRedit:
1. Translation time is reduced by 20 to 30 per cent, mainly because QRedit dramaticallyreduces the time necessary for dictionary lookup and web search; and2. The quality of draft translations is improved, because paragraph and textual reading is nothampered by a cumbersome process of reference lookup.
Though further detailed and systematic research is needed on this point, QRedit provides mostof the translation-aid functions required by online volunteer translators.

4

Community building and implicit translation training

Although the main target of MNH is individual translators and groups of translators who alreadyknow one another (such as a team of volunteer translators working in an NGO), MNH has several
Web 2.0 features to facilitate the community building among those who register at MNH. It has asocial tagging system that allows users to tag translations with their favorite keywords; it allows
users to submit questions about translation to MNH, so that users can help each other; and it
also allows users to issue request for translation. Message exchange function is also provided in
MNH, so that users can communicate with each other within MNH, even if they do not knoweach other’s external e-mail addresses or contacts information.
Users can issue permission for other translators to edit their original translation. Such permission can be open-ended, or restricted to a particular group of users. This makes it easy forgroups of translators sharing the same topics of interest to form loosely networked communities.

Figure 5. A comparative view of diﬀerent versions of a translation
The most important contribution of this function to volunteer translators, however, is its implicit
translation training function for inexperienced translators. Many NGOs and NPOs constantly
face the problem of a lack of good volunteer translators as well as high turnover among those they
do have. Due to the low retention rate of volunteer translators, the core, experienced translators
become busier, leaving them no time to give advice to inexperienced translators, thus creating a
vicious circle.
The implicit translation training in MNH works as follows:
1. An inexperienced translator, after translating a document, gives permission for experienced
translators to edit the draft translation. Experienced translators edit the draft, and ﬁnalise
the translation. Note that this is the normal task ﬂow adopted in many NGOs/NPOs.
2. MNH keeps a log of these ﬁnalised translations (a maximum of 10 versions for any one
document). Thus, a record of how experienced translators modiﬁed the draft translationis retained in the MNH database.
3. Translators who have the permission to edit can see the diﬀerence between any pair oftranslation versions kept in the MNH database. Inexperienced translators can therefore
check where and how their translations were modiﬁed by experienced translators. Figure
5 shows the comparative view of two diﬀerent versions of a translation.
Although this mechanism still requires that inexperienced translators make the eﬀort to learn
from the modiﬁcation logs, it can potentially provide great assistance in improving their skills,

as they can take advantage of information that has not been accessible in the traditional working
environment.

5

Reference resources

One of MNH’s main features is that it provides rich – though limited in terms of language pairs –reference resources necessary for translation in QRedit. One of the most frequent requests madeby volunteer translators is easy lookup of high-quality dictionaries and Wikipedia. Terminologicalmanagement and TM are considered by many volunteer translators as desirable but not essential.
Bilingual dictionaries: The supply of a high-quality dictionary is essential to attract volunteer translators to MNH. We negotiated with one of the most prestigious dictionary publishers
in Japan, Sanseido, and obtained permission to use Sanseido’s Grand Concise English-Japanese
Dictionary, which contains 360,000 entries. This is one of the most highly regarded EnglishJapanese dictionaries for translators. In addition, we provide the free Japanese-English dictionary
EDICT [8] for both English to Japanese and Japanese to English translations. English-Chineseand Chinese dictionaries are to be supplied soon, which will extend MNH to Chinese.
Encyclopedic information: QRedit provides entries from Wikipedia. When there are corresponding Japanese and English entries, users can look up English to Japanese or Japanese to
English translation information extracted from Wikipedia entries. When there are only English
or Japanese entries, users can look up monolingual information.
Terminology and proper names: When MNH was made public, QRedit did not provide
rich terminological resources. Since then, large terminologies of medicine and law have been
uploaded by developers and users and made public. We have also developed a Web crawler tocollect bilingual terminologies from the Web. This resource, consisting of about 2 million terms,
will be made public as soon as information cleaning up is complete and copyright status is clariﬁed[9]. An automatically collected compilation of proper-name translation pairs, containing around
400,000 proper-name translations, is also to be made available [10]. In addition, individual users
can register terms either manually or using the term extraction and management mechanism,
in which users can extract terms from their own or speciﬁed text pairs, check the result of
extraction, and register them as their own terminological data.
Translation memory: The translations published on MNH are analysed and recycled as a
TM resource. Major NGO users, such as Amnesty International and Democracy Now! Japan,
have also provided their translations as TM for MNH. We also provide copyright free translation
pairs collected from the Web (approximately 1.4 million English words) [11]. These are notcurrently retrievable from the QRedit small lookup window; another window must be used toretrieve TM. We will integrate TM lookup into QRedit as soon as possible.

6

Current state of usage

We made MNH publicly available on 7th April, 2009. Figure 6 shows statistics on MNH asof 20th October, 2009. The upper panel shows the number of registered users; the middle
panel the number of registered documents (the top line shows the total number of documents,
including both published and unpublished documents, and the lower line the number of publisheddocuments); and the bottom panel the number of registered bilingual term pairs (the top line
shows the total number of terms, including both published and unpublished terms, and the lower
line the number of published terms).
In the six months since MNH has become publicly available, it has attracted more than 900
registered users, of which 39 publish their translations through MNH. Amnesty International
Japan and Democracy Now! Japan, as well as the Japanese translation team of GlobalVoices
Online and some members of Translators United for Peace (TUP) are using MNH. A few universities use MNH in their lecture or seminar courses. One publisher, Sakuhinsha, has used MNH
on an experimental basis to translate books into Japanese. One title has already been published[12], and others are due to follow.
Though the growth of registration has slowed down recently, we are expecting more users
to register as we have just made the site fully compatible with Safari on the Mac and IE8
on Windows (previously, the full range of functions was only available with Firefox or Google
Chrome) and are planning to launch a second-stage campaign for attracting NGOs/NPOs as
well as publishers involved in translation work.
As for the number of translations, MNH currently has 2,340 translated documents, among
which 1,235 have been published on the site. The other documents remain unpublished, or
the translators may use them on their own sites, outside MNH. The total of 2,340 documents
amounts to 17,066 translation pairs as counted by sentences. Since the end of May, the growthof translated documents has been linear.
Nearly 50,000 bilingual term pairs have been registered to MNH so far. Looking at the bottom
panel of Figure 6, we can observe that most of these pairs were registered in April and May,
2009. This is because large terminological lists were uploaded during that period. Although thegrowth rate of bilingual terms registered to MNH has slowed down, it is still increasing steadily.

7

Conclusions

In this paper, we have introduced the basic features of the translation hosting site Minna no
Hon’yaku (MNH) and QRedit, a translation-aid editor provided as part of MNH. The goal of
MNH is:
1. to provide a large-scale archive of translations and their originals available to all underclear licenses, which constitutes a translation news site, and
2. to facilitate translation and nurture online translation communities
by providing online volunteer translators with a hosting service for translation activities and aneasy-to-use translation-aid editor.

Figure 6. Some statistics on MNH
As mentioned above, according to an informal interview with three MNH users, translation
time was reduced on average by 25 per cent, and the quality of the ﬁrst, draft translation was
improved by using MNH. Although we need to carry out systematic evaluation in order to conﬁrm
these reports, the fact that the number of users as well as the number of translated documents
has steadily increased shows the practical usefulness of MNH. Though seemingly similar services
have become available, such as Google Translator Toolkit [13], the translation-aid functions andhosting functions provided by MNH are unique and of higher quality. The basic concept of MNH
is, as mentioned in the introduction, to make humans more intelligent by making computers more
intelligent, and vice versa. Our emphasis at present is on human translators, but the translations
accumulated in MNH are to be used to improve MT and the translation-aid functions of MNH
further.

The biggest limitation of MNH for now is that it can only deal with English to Japaneseand Japanese to English translations. This limitation of language pairs is inevitable in the shortterm, because to materialise fully the design concept of MNH, we need high-quality dictionary
resources, such as the Sanseido dictionary we are currently using [4]. In the second stage, wewill extend MNH to English to Chinese and Chinese to English translation. We hope that byextending the system to cover other languages with the cooperation of dictionary publishers,
MNH will provide a social infrastructure for truly universal multilingual communication in the
not-so-distant future.

Acknowledgements
This work is partly supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS) grantin-aid (A) 21240021 “Developing an integrated translation-aid site which provides comprehensive
reference sources for translators” and by the 2009 NII research cooperation project “Construction
and use of practical terminological resources from a variety of information sources”.

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