Management and use of terminological resources for distributed
users in the translation hosting site Minna no Hon'yaku
Takeshi Abekawa, Masao Utiyama§, Eiichiro Sumita§ and Kyo Kageura¶#National Institute of Informatics, Japan (abekawa@nii.ac.jp)§National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan({mutiyama, eiichiro.sumta}@nict.go.jp)¶University of Tokyo, Japan (kyo@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

Abstract
In this demonstration, we show the terminology management module of Minnano Hon’yaku (MNH: http://trans-aid.jp/), a translation hosting site with integrated
translation-aid mechanisms, which was made publicly available in April 2009. Asof February 8th, 2010, 1062 users have registered with MNH and more than 3400
documents have been translated, of which more than 1600 translations have been
published on the site. On MNH, users can translate documents individually or candefine groups and share the translation task. It provides users with functions suchas lookup of high-quality dictionaries and terminologies, seamless access to
Wikipedia and Google search, and reference to TM. There are two types ofterminological resources on MNH, i.e. those provided by the system and thoseregistered by users. The demonstration shows how terms are registered, sharedand used.

1. Introduction
This demonstration shows 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 mechanismsthat enable users to manage and make use of terminological resources. MNH was made public
on April 7, 2009. As of February 8th, 2010, 1062 users have registered with MNH, 3430
documents have been translated using the translation-aid functions provided by MNH, and ofthese 1630 have been published on the MNH site. Currently MNH accommodates theEnglish-to-Japanese and Japanese-to-English language pairs, but the coverage is to beextended to English-to-Chinese, Chinese-to-English, Japanese-to-Chinese and Chinese-toJapanese in near future.
MNH provides functions to aid individual translators, including an automatic flexible lookupof high-quality dictionaries and terminology resources, seamless access to Wikipedia andGoogle search, and access to translation memory (TM). Registered users can also constitutegroups, within which members can share translation tasks and user-defined resources.
Terminologies are a critical resource for translation and their management is especially
important because, together with TM, many translators or translator groups keep their own
lists, and update and maintain them in the course of translation. This poses a challenge to any
open translation-aid platform on which translation groups may be defined less systematicallythan in a well established translation environment.
In the following, we give a brief overview of MNH in section 2, and summarise the natureand status of terminological resources in a distributed user environment in section 3. Section 4outlines the terminology management functions of MNH, first at the registration phase andthen at the use phase. Section 5 outlines the prospects for MNH.
2. MNH: A brief overview
The basic functions provided by MNH are as follows (Utiyama, et. al. 2009):
1. anybody can register with MNH anonymously, and is provided with her/his personal
space;
2. users can publish their translations on the MNH site, if copyright permits;
3. a variety of social networking functions are provided, including social tagging, message
exchange, question and answer, translation request, etc.;
4. users can define a group on MNH, in which they can co-edit translations, share registeredterms, share translation memories;
5. register terms, upload and manage terminologies, register translation memory database;
6. search translation texts, translated sentence pairs (TM), translators, tags, and registeredterms.
Translators who register with MNH can produce translations by using QRedit. QRedit is a
two-pane translation-aid editor incorporated in MNH (Figure 1), which provides the following
functions for online translators (Abekawa & Kageura, 2007; Takeuchi, et. al. 2007):
1. flexible (idiom variations can be matched to dictionary entries), stratified (important ordifficult multi-word elements are emphasised) lookup in and copy-and-paste from a highquality dictionary (, 2001), some free dictionaries, and terminologies;
2. seamless connection to Wikipedia monolingual and bilingual entries;
3. seamless connection to Google search;
4. function to register terms in the process of translating and immediately enable theirlookup;
5. an easy-to-use and effective interface which enables users to concentrate on translation.
Note that users can lookup terms not only within QRedit but also from the search box
provided by MNH. From the point of view of process, lookup in QRedit constitutes anintegral part of translation, while lookup from MNH is one step away from the translation
process itself.
3. The nature and role of terminological resources
Terminological resources tend to be varied, compared to ordinary dictionaries (ordinarydictionaries are numerous, but they are categorised into a few general groups). There are somestandard terminological lexicons for some domains, while other domains have no coherent
terminological lexicons. Translators, subject specialists and in-house terminologists tend tomaintain terminologies of their own or of the group they work for. For instance, Amnesty
International Japan, which uses MNH, maintains its own list of terms to be used in translation.
The position of these terminological resources from the point of view of usage may vary aswell. Sometimes the use of translations of terms given in certain lists is obligatory. Sometimes
the lists are used to provide translators with possible candidates, which are not obligatory.
Once a translation of a term is chosen, it should be used consistently, to maintain the qualityof translations throughout a text, a group of texts, or a domain. The importance ofFigure 1. An image of translation-aid editor QRedit

terminology management in translation-aid systems has long been recognised (Hutchins,1998), and most major TM or translation-aid tools provide terminology management modules.
Unlike commercial TM or terminology management tools, most of which assume wellorganised and managed users, MNH is open to anybody and thus cannot make suchassumptions. This creates challenges for the functional design of terminological management.
Considering these factors, it is necessary for the terminological management module on MNH
to allow the stratification of terminological resources, possibly according to the type ofresource and to users' requirements. We can roughly classify four types of terminologicalresources on MNH: (i) coherent and edited terminologies, which have more or less the same
status as general dictionaries, and are provided by the system itself; (ii) an open-ended
depository of bilingual terms registered by MNH users (which include (iii) and (iv)); (iii)
terminological lists managed by specific groups such as Amnesty International; and (iv)personal lists of terms registered by individual MNH users. Many group users needorganisation and coordination of terminologies, while individual users should preferably beable to choose what to use and how among these resources. The end result is a loosely
connected network for sharing user-registered information.

4. Management of terminological resources on MNH
4.1 Terminological resources provided by MNH
Well established terminologies of various domains can be provided by MNH administrators,
just like general high-quality dictionaries. Currently, bilingual entries from Wikipedia areprovided. A terminology of the legal domain, a semi-automatically constructed proper namebilingual lexicon (Sato, 2009), and a large scale, semi-automatically compiled terminologicallexicon (Abekawa & Kageura, 2009) are to be provided as well. Users can freely lookup theseterminological lexicons from QRedit. If they do not wish to consult some of these resources,
they can disable their look-up from the page “selecting target dictionaries/terminologies for
QRedit lookup” on MNH.
4.2 Terminological resources registered by users
Users can register bilingual terms at two different phases, (a) in the process of translation
when they are using QRedit, and (b) at the MNH terminology management page (see section2). In QRedit, users can register terms only one by one. The MNH terminology management
page provides users with three ways of registering terms: (i) register terms one by one, in thesame way as registering terms on QRedit; (ii) upload a pre-compiled list of terms; and (iii)
edit, select and register automatically extracted bilingual term candidates from translation
texts specified by users (users can select translation texts accumulated on MNH by translator,
by a variety of tags attached to translations, or by pre-defined groups of translations). At thetime of registration or at a later stage, users can designate the status of terms as “personal use”,“open to a limited range of users”, and “open to all MNH users”.
The terms registered by users can be looked up either from the MNH search box or directlyfrom QRedit in the process of translating (section 2). For the purpose of explanation, let AP
be the set of terms registered by the user A with “personal use” status, AL the set of terms
registered by A with “open to a limited range of users” status, and AA the set of terms
registered by A with “open to all the MNH users” status. The user A can look up all AP, ALand AA immediately both from MNH and from QRedit. For users other than A, theaccessibility of AP, AL and AA is as follows:
AP: not accessible, either on MNH or on QRedit;
AL: becomes accessible on MNH and on QRedit only when user A gives explicit permission
for use by specific users. To make the terms available, therefore, A must take two steps:
giving terms the status of “limited use” and then giving permission for use to specificusers.
AA: becomes immediately accessible by all users on MNH but becomes accessible in QRedit
only when A gives permission to specific users (which means that the accessibility within
QRedit is essentially the same as AL).
Currently, the status control of registered terms is only given to the supply side. The demandside (users who are given permission for use by A) does not have a mechanism to block thelookup of terms which have been made accessible. This is because we originally designed themechanism to deal with shared terminology lookup as required by such NGOs as Amnesty
International; like professional translators working with companies, volunteer translators
working with such NGOs as Amnesty International must follow the prescribed usage of

certain terms. So we made the demand side open - when the person in charge of terminology
gives permission for translators in the same group, they must be able to look them up. On theother hand, if, in the absence of the demand side control, AA were to become directly
accessible by all users within QRedit in the process of translation, it would become
overwhelming; hence the setting of AA as above. This setting is fragile for spam terms. Forinstance, if a user registers a large number of wrong bilingual terms and gives permission toother users, they will have to face wrong translations in the QRedit small pop-up window forreference lookup. Recognising that this risk may increase as the number of users grows, weare currently developing a control mechanism for terms from the demand side.
5. Prospects
In this paper, we have explained the management and use of terminological resources on
MNH and in QRedit. As of February 8th, 2010, the number of registered terms on MNH was55,508. Of these, 45,723 have been made public by those who registered terms. The growth ofregistered terms are shown in Figure 2. It is observed that there are periods when a hugechunk of terms are registered at once, which corresponds to the registration of term lists
maintained by users.

Figure 2. The growth of registered terms
As for their use, although the supply side control of the accessibility of terms currently
adopted in MNH assumes the goodwill of users and can be risky, group users are currently
making responsible use of this mechanism. Currently we have no problem reports from users
with regard to terminology management.
Everything described in this paper is fully functional on the MNH site; the demonstration
will thus be able to show the mechanisms of terminology management within the actual
workflow of online translation by individual and group translators. Though the main interface
is now in Japanese, an English interface will become available in 2009. Currently, MNH only
supports English-to-Japanese and Japanese-to-English translation, but this is due to thelimitated availability of high quality dictionaries. If good dictionaries become available, it canbe made fully functional for English-to-anylanguage or Japanese-to-anylanguage, without theneed for any modification to the current architecture.

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 2009 National Institute ofInformatics (NII) research cooperation project “Construction and use of practicalterminological resources from a variety of information sources.”
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