The Strategic Supply of Reference Resources and Lookup
Environments via an Online Translation Hosting Site
Masao Utiyama§, Takeshi Abekawa#, Kyo Kageura¶ and Eiichiro Sumita§§

National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan({mutiyama, eiichiro.sumta}@nict.go.jp)#National Institute of Informatics, Japan (abekawa@nii.ac.jp)¶University of Tokyo, Japan (kyo@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

Abstract
In this demonstration, we introduce the strategic supply of a range of reference
resources for translators via Minna no Hon’yaku (MNH: http://trans-aid.jp/), atranslation hosting site with integrated translation-aid mechanisms, which wasmade publicly available in April 2009. As of June 2011, nearly 1700 users haveregistered with MNH and more than 7000 documents have been translated, of
which over 2800 have been published on the site.
1. Introduction
This demonstration introduces the translation hosting site Minna no Hon'yaku (MNH:translation of/for/by all) accessible at http://trans-aid.jp/, placing special emphasis on the roleand status of the range of reference tools provided via the site. MNH was made public onApril 7, 2009. As of June 22, 2011, 1669 users have registered with MNH, 7023 documents
have been translated using the translation-aid functions provided by MNH, and of these 2808
have been published on the MNH site. Currently MNH accommodates English-to-Japanese,
Japanese-to-English, English-to-Chinese, Chinese-to-English, Japanese-to-Chinese, Chineseto-Japanese, and English-to-Catalan language pairs. In this presentation we focus on Englishto-Japanese translation, as reference resources are most complete in the English-to-Japanesetranslation environment on MNH and constitute a model case for the future development ofreference resources for other language pairs. Section 2 provides a brief overview of MNH,
while section 3 sets out general desiderata for reference resources in translation. Section 4outlines the reference resources provided by MNH together with their conceptual status andimportance.
2. A brief overview of MNH
MNH consists of two main parts: (a) the MNH platform, which manages all theinformation related to users and translations, and (b) QRedit, which is an advanced
translation-aid editor facilitating translation itself. The basic functions provided by the MNH
platform can be summarized as follows (Utiyama, et. al. 2009):
1. Users can register with MNH anonymously, and are provided with their own personalspace;
2. Users can publish their translations on the MNH site, when copyright permits;
3. Users can take advantage of a variety of social networking functions, including social

tagging, message exchange, question and answer, translation request, and bulletin board;
4. Users can define a group on MNH in which they can co-edit translations, and shareregistered terms and translation memories;
5. Users can register terms, upload and manage terminologies, and register translation
memory databases;
6. Uses can search translation texts, translated sentence pairs (TM), translators, tags, andterms.
Translators who register with MNH can produce translations using QRedit, a two-panetranslation-aid editor incorporated in MNH (Figure 1), which provides the following functions
for online translators (Abekawa & Kageura, 2007; Takeuchi, et. al. 2007):
1. flexible lookup of reference resources, including a high-quality dictionary (Sanseido,2001), some free dictionaries, and terminologies (idiom variations can be matched todictionary entries);
2. stratified lookup of reference resources (important or difficult multi-word elements areemphasized);
3. copy-and-paste from reference resources on the editor;
4. seamless connection to Wikipedia monolingual and bilingual entries;
5. seamless connection to both Google Web search and dictionary search;
6. the ability to register terms while in the process of translating and immediately enable theirlookup;
7. an easy-to-use and effective interface that enables users to concentrate on translation.

Figure 1. Translation-aid editor QRedit
3. Requirements for reference resources in translation
The requirements for reference resources in translation are essentially determined bythree factors, the importance of which depends on the type of reference resource in question:(a) The type of information to be looked up by translators. The main types are the meanings
of expressions in the source language (SL), and expressions in the target language (TL), of
which the latter is of utmost significance for translators.

(b) The state of existing reference resources. The number of reference resources, especiallylexical and terminological resources used by translators, is finite at any given time for a given
language or language pair.
(c) The common perception of and attitude towards resources by translators and users.
Checking certain reference resources, especially those used for checking TL expressions, areobligatory for translators, such as the authentic terminological lexicon of a given domain.
From consideration of these factors, the concepts of “(relative) comprehensiveness”
and “normativeness” can be derived, and very rough desiderata for reference resources can beprescribed on the basis of these two concepts (Kageura & Abekawa, 2011):(a) With regard to general dictionaries (which are used for looking up SL meanings), at least
one of the most comprehensive dictionaries available should be provided;(b) With regard to resources used for looking up TL expressions, such as terminologicaldictionaries, proper name dictionaries and translation memories, those resources accepted asnecessary among users, even if they are not comprehensive, should be provided. If authentic
resources are not available (which is often the case with terminological dictionaries and otherresources), the system need to provide resources that are relatively more comprehensive thanothers. Also, irrespective of whether authentic resources are available or not, resources that
may be less authentic but more comprehensive should be provided as secondary resources;(c) With regard to online textual resources (corpora) that are used as a surrogate forcomprehensive library searches, those accepted as an essential resource should be provided.
Currently, this means Google search should be provided from within the system.
4. The nature of the reference resources provided by MNH
4.1 General comprehensive dictionaries commonly used by translators
In MNH, we provide two of the most commonly used and most comprehensive
English-to-Japanese dictionaries available in Japan, i.e. Sanseido's Grand Concise EnglishJapanese Dictionary (Sanseido, 2001) and Eijiro (Eijiro, 2010). While there are other highquality, comprehensive dictionaries on the market, we chose Sanseido (2011) because it has
good coverage of topics frequently dealt with online, and is thus likely to be of particular use
to online translators. Sanseido (2001) supports both normativeness and relativecomprehensiveness, while Eijiro (2010) supports comprehensiveness.
4.2 Google Web and dictionary search
Users can trigger Google Web search and dictionary search in a seamless manner fromwithin QRedit. By means of the Google Web search function, MNH provides acomprehensive online archival search on the Internet. On the other hand, Google dictionary
search can be less normative than that provided by Sanseido (2001), but it contributes
collectively to the comprehensiveness of ordinary dictionaries provided by MNH.
4.3 Translation memories provided by users
Some group users (NGOs) such as Amnesty International Japan or DemocracyNow!
Japan provide translation memories that could potentially be recycled for checking target
language expressions. As this class of information depends on users or user groups, MNH
provides a platform and mechanism through which users who want to look up translations
they made in the past can register their data as translation memories. In addition, thetranslations made using MNH and made public are automatically incorporated into ***thetranslation memory datatabase/OR/translation memory databases ?? ***. These resources
constitute reference information that is “comprehensive” in a narrow sense, i.e. it iscomprehensive in terms of the task carried out by those users who provide the translation
memory data.
4.4 User-registered terminologies
Like translation memories, users can register terminological lists maintained
specifically by them. The status of this terminological data is essentially the same as that oftranslation memories, the only difference being the units of expressions being looked up.
4.5 Automatically collected resources
A semi-automatically constructed proper name bilingual lexicon (Sato, 2009) and alarge-scale, comprehensive semi-automatically compiled terminological lexicon (Abekawa &Kageura, 2009) are to be provided as well. While we do not have space here to explain thetechnical details, these two lexicons are constructed on the basis of a strategy completely
different from most existing corpus-based methods. The methods adopted in generating thebilingual proper name lexicon and terminological lexicon simulate what translators do online
in looking for translations of proper names and terms. Thus they guarantee that what users canfind online can be found in the lexicons, while simultaneously reducing the burden on
translators of the current trial-and-error method of looking for necessary information using
Google search. These lexicons currently run as independent systems but they will beincorporated into MNH in the near future.
Acknowledgements
This work is partly supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences(JSPS) grant-in-aid (A) 21240021 “Developing an integrated translation-aid site which
provides comprehensive reference sources for translators” and by the 2011 National Instituteof Informatics (NII) research cooperation project “Construction and use of practicalterminological resources from a variety of information sources.”
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