Hosting Volunteer Translators
Masao Utiyama
Takeshi Abekawa
Eiichiro Sumita
Kyo Kageura
MASTAR Project
National Institute
MASTAR Project
Tokyo University
NICT
of Informatics
NICT
Keihanna Science City2-1-2, Hitotsubashi
Keihanna Science City 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku
619-0288 Kyoto, Japan 101-8430 Tokyo, Japan 619-0288 Kyoto, Japan 113-0033 Tokyo, Japanmutiyama@nict.go.jp
abekawa@nii.ac.jp eiichiro.sumita@nict.go.jp kyo@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Abstract
We have developed a web site called Minna no
Hon’yaku (“Translation for Everyone by Everyone”), which hosts online volunteer translators. Its core features are (1) a blog-likelook and feel; (2) the legal sharing of translations; (3) high quality, comprehensive language resources; and (4) the translation aid editor QRedit. Translators who use QRedit daily
reported an up to 30 per cent reduction of theoverall translation time. As of 3 July 2009,
there are about 600 users and 4 groups registered to MNH, including such major NGOs as
Amnesty International Japan and Democracy
Now! Japan.

1

Introduction

Online volunteer translators, who are involved intranslating online electronic documents in their freetime, translate a variety of documents every day,such as blogs, Wikipedia articles, open source software manuals, documents on nongovernmental organization (NGO) activities, and so on.
These translations are read for pleasure, for practical purposes, for language learning, and manyother reasons.
Needless to say, volunteer translators contributea great deal to the sharing and spreading of information around the world. Consequently, supporting
their activities is a very important research issue.
Volunteer translators translate a large number of
documents everyday. However, they lack propertranslation support tools (Abekawa and Kageura,2007a). Thus, providing a good supporting environment should be of great assistance in improving volunteer translators’ efficiency and increasing the levelof enjoyment they experience in translating. This is
the motivation for our work in this paper.

2 Hosting volunteer translators
Abekawa and Kageura (2007a) have developed atranslation aid editor, QRedit, which has been experimentally provided to a limited number of volunteer
translators. They report that QRedit is very effective
for aiding their work, as described in Section 8.
Based on the success of this translation aid editor, we have developed a web site called Minnano Hon’yaku (MNH, “Translation for Everyone by
Everyone”) where everyone uses QRedit and othertranslation support tools. In addition, documents
translated on MNH are open to the public because
these translations are assigned open licenses such as
Creative Commons licenses. A screenshot of MNH
is shown in Figure 1.
Currently, MNH hosts volunteer translators whotranslate Japanese (English) documents into English (Japanese), as QRedit currently only supports
Japanese-English and English-Japanese translation
directions. We plan to extend QRedit and MNH toother language pairs in our future work. We alsoplan to make QRedit and the software system of
MNH open source.
There are three reasons why we have developed
MNH.
First, we were inspired by the success of hosting services for open source software such assourceforge.net. These services help engi-

In the following sections, we describe the detailsof MNH.

3 MNH core features
MNH has the following four core features: (1) ablog-like look and feel; (2) the legal sharing of translations; (3) high quality, comprehensive language resources; and (4) the translation aid editor QRedit.

4 Blog-like look and feel
Figure 1: Screenshot of “Minna no Hon’yaku” site(http://trans-aid.jp/)

neers develop and distribute open source software.
Our hope is that hosting services for volunteer translators could have a similar impact on the creationand distribution of translations.
Second, hosting volunteer translators enables
them to use translation support tools without installation efforts (or fees) because support tools such as
QRedit are built-in functions of MNH (and everyone uses MNH for free). This situation sharply contrasts to the usual situation of volunteer translators
in which they do not use translation aid systems fora variety of reasons, such as the fact that they are too
expensive for personal use. (Abekawa and Kageura,2007a).
Third, hosting volunteer translators means that
their documents are saved and published on MNH.
These translations are shared by translators and used
to make a parallel corpus. Translators can search thisparallel corpus for expressions translated by othertranslators. This is an important benefit of hosting
volunteer translators, for if a large number of translators use MNH, a large parallel corpus will become
available on the site. Consequently, translators will
be able to share a rich parallel corpus for their translation activities.
We opened MNH to the public on April 8 2009.
We also asked several volunteer translation groups
to use MNH as their translation platform in orderto get feedback for improving MNH. We are now
running MNH to see if MNH can attract and hostmany volunteer translators.1
1

Currently, MNH only has a Japanese interface. We plan to

We designed the look and feel of MNH to be similar to those of standard blogs, to make it as easy as
possible for a wide variety of volunteer translators
to use.
For example, the top page of MNH (Figure 1) lists
new translations, active translators, translations of
Wikipedia articles, and so on. The three lines at
the top part of the page list tags that are assignedby translators to their translations. By clicking onthese tags, the corresponding translations are listed
in the top page. The box in the upper right corner isthe search box for documents, tags, translators, andso on. MNH also provides a place where translators
can ask and answer questions on any topic. Thismechanism is very useful for sharing translation experiences.
When a translator, taro, logins to MNH, he is delivered to his personal page, as shown in Figure 2,
where he edits his translations. To translate a new
document, he enters the URL of the document into
the long box at the top of the page and clicks the
button on the right side. This launches the translation aid editor QRedit, which he uses to translatethat document. The details of QRedit are describedin Section 7. When he finishes his translation, thetranslation is saved to his personal space. He may
open his translation to the public after assigning aproper license to the document. Open translations
are shared by translators (and others) as described in
Section 5.
Translators also share term lists which they enter into MNH. A screenshot of a term list is shownin Figure 3. These terms are treated as public domain contents as described in the terms of service of
MNH. Thus, anyone can use these term lists for any
purpose.
add an English interface by the end of this summer.

Commons licenses.
Brief descriptions of
how these licenses work are set out below(http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/).
Attribution This license lets others distribute,
remix, tweak, and build upon the translators
work, even commercially, as long as they credit
the translator for the original creation.

Figure 2: Screenshot of a personal page

Attribution Share Alike This license lets others
remix, tweak, and build upon the translator’s
work even for commercial reasons, as long as
they credit the translator and license their new
creations under the identical terms.
Attribution Non-Commercial This license lets
others remix, tweak, and build upon the translator’s work non-commercially, and although
their new works must also acknowledge thetranslator and be non-commercial, they don’t
have to license their derivative works on thesame terms.

Figure 3: Screenshot of a term list

5

Legal sharing of translations

Sharing translations legally is the third reason for thedevelopment of MNH as described in Section 2. To
achieve this goal, MNH requires translators to assign
open licenses to their translations if they make thempublic.
Translators cannot make their translations public without the permission of the original authors oftranslated texts. Thus, MNH first asks translators to
confirm that the authors of original texts allow this.
If they do not, MNH asks translators not to open
their translations to the public and only use them forpersonal purposes.
If translators have the right to make their translations public, MNH next asks them to assign open
licenses to their translations. This allows anyone tomodify the translations and make derivative works
public under certain conditions.
Specifically,
MNH uses four Creative

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike Thislicense lets others remix, tweak, and build
upon the translator’s work non-commercially,
as long as they credit the translator and license
their new creations under identical terms.
Translators can also use other licenses that are similar to the Creative Commons licenses listed above.
In this way, translators can legally share theirtranslations on MNH. These shared translations areused to make a parallel corpus by using a sentencealignment method (Utiyama and Isahara, 2003).
Currently, MNH has a simple bilingual concordancer as shown in Figure 4. We plan to extend thisconcordancer in our future work because a bilingual
concordancer is a very important tool for translation(Macklovitch et al., 2009).

6

High quality, comprehensive language
resources

Dictionaries and the web are the two main language
resources that online volunteer translators use duringtranslation.
MNH, in cooperation with Sanseido, provides
the “Grand Concise English Japanese Dictionary”

(1) They are native-speakers of the target language(TL).
(2) Most of them do not have a native-level command in the source language (SL).
(3) They do not use a translation aid system or machine translation (MT) system.
(4) They want to reduce the burden involved in theprocess of translation.
(5) They spend a great deal of time looking up reference sources.
Figure 4: Screenshot of bilingual search results(Sanseido, 2006) to translators. It has about 360,000
entries and is socially accepted as a standard andcomprehensive dictionary. Consequently, translators will not need to use other dictionaries in mostcases. We also plan to incorporate a comprehensive Japanese-English dictionary of names, collectedfrom the web and consisting of about 400,000 entries (Sato, 2009), in order to handle person namesthat are not covered in usual bilingual dictionaries.
MNH also provides seamless access to the web,because the web is a very important resource forchecking factual information.2 For example, MNH
provides a dictionary that was made from the English Wikipedia. This enables translators to reference Wikipedia articles during the translation process as if they are looking up dictionaries. MNH
also provides a seamless connection to web searches
as described in the next section.

7

Translation aid editor: QRedit

7.1 About QRedit
QRedit is a translation aid system which is designed for volunteer translators working mainly online (Abekawa and Kageura, 2007a). Volunteer
translators involved in translating online documents
have a variety of backgrounds. Some are professional translators, some translate documents about
topics they are interested in, while others translate
as a part of their NGO activities. They neverthelessshare a few basic characteristics:
2

The fact check function was traditionally provided by libraries, but online translators normally use the web instead ofgoing to libraries.

(6) The smallest basic unit of translation is theparagraph and “at a glance” readability of the
SL text is very important.
The philosophy of QRedit reflects these characteristics and can be summarized as follows:(R1) To reduce the time it takes for translators to dowhat they are currently doing, rather than to
add new functions;(R2) To provide sufficient information sources sothat translators do not have to look elsewhere;(R3) To provide information to facilitate decisionmaking by translators;(R4) To provide information that triggers translators’ creativity;(R5) To make the interface as simple as possible.
These requirements stem from the requests madeby volunteer translators (Abekawa and Kageura,2007a). QRedit was designed to meet these requirements. For example, it uses the high quality, comprehensive language resources described in Section
6, based on R2. It also provides a seamless connection to web searches, based on R4. Further, basedon R1 and R3, QRedit does not provide an MT function, for the following reasons:(1) In terms of the quality of translation, MT results are far behind human translations for JapaneseEnglish (or English-Japanese) translation. As a result, using MT results does not contribute to the reduction of the overall translation time.3
3

For some language pairs such as English-French, MT systems can be used to prepare rough translations. In that case, we
can easily extend QRedit to incorporate MT. For example, we
can regard MT as an extended word lookup function, so that MT
results are presented to users in addition to dictionary entries asshown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Screenshot of QRedit(2) Given input texts, MT systems produce output
translations without human intervention. This situation contradicts R3. Even if MT outputs are goodtranslations, for now most translators are not readyto accept MT results as reliable, because they do notregard computers as communication partners. Thus,
they want to decide on translations and control translation process by themselves.
Finally, we made the interface of QRedit as simple as possible to meet R5.
In the following sections, we introduce major features of QRedit.
7.2 Automatic word lookup
When a URL of an SL text is input into QRedit, itloads the corresponding text into the left-hand panel,as shown in Figure 5. (Users can also copy-andpaste the SL text.) Then, QRedit automatically looks
up all words in the SL text using the dictionaries
described in Section 6. When a user clicks on an
SL word, its translation candidates are displayed ina pop-up window. The user can paste a translation
candidate into the right-hand panel, which is used
for writing the translation, as described in Section
7.3.
7.2.1 Idiom lookup
In addition to the single word lookup method,
QRedit has a flexible multi-word unit lookup function (Takeuchi et al., 2007). For example, QRedit
automatically looks up the dictionary entry “withone’s tongue in one’s cheek” for the expression “Hesaid that with his big fat tongue in his big fat cheek”

or “head screwed on right” for “head screwed onwrong”.
This function is a major advantage of QRedit
compared to other MT systems or computer-aidedtranslation (CAT) systems. Indeed, this function has
not been realized in any English-Japanese MT system we have checked, and while some CAT systems realize similar functions through approximate
matching, they do not specifically target the look-up
of idioms with their variations.
The lack of flexible idiom lookup in other systems does not mean that this function is not needed.
In fact, there is a pressing need for it. The importance of this function derives from two factors: (a)many translators, even experienced ones, have relatively less knowledge of idioms than of words; and(b) some idioms may not be identified as such bytranslators, because they make sense without an idiomatic interpretation. This leads to translation mistakes.
The flexible multi-word unit lookup function of
QRedit helps translators identify idioms, and thus
reduce translation mistakes.
7.2.2

Stratified term emphasis

Because idioms are often missed by translators,
QRedit notifies translators of the existence of idioms
or terms that have special meanings.
To notify users of the existence of such terms, it
is good to highlight the terms with text decoration.
But too many highlighted terms reduces the readability of source language texts dramatically. This isa serious problem, because the richer the reference
sources become, the greater the number of candidates for notification.
To resolve this problem, QRedit adopts a stratified term emphasis method, which distinguishes
three user awareness levels depending on the typeand nature of the reference unit, or the candidate
term for notification. These awareness levels are reflected in the way the reference units are displayed,such as a change of background color or underlining. These levels are decided according to a four
criteria: “composition,” “difficulty,” “specialty” and“resource type.” See Figure 5 for an example andrefer to (Abekawa and Kageura, 2007b) for detailsof this method.

7.3 Lookup that doesn’t disturb translation
When users click on a term in the left-hand panel,
its translation candidates are displayed in a pop-up
window, as shown in Figure 5. This action does notaffect keyboard operation. That is, users can still
write their translations continuously without moving the mouse cursor back to the right-hand panel,as whatever they do with the mouse, the keyboard
cursor always stays in this panel.
This function helps translators concentrate ontranslation, as the interviews in Section 8 show. If
translators had to reset the cursor every time theylooked up the dictionaries, it would break the rhythmof their work. QRedit helps them maintain theirrhythm and focus on their translation activities.
7.4 Functions associated with lookup
Translators can call up the following four functions
for each term and each translated candidate in a popup window, as shown in Figure 5.
• PastePaste a term or translation term to the righthand panel. This helps the translator avoid misspelling of long named entities or numericalrepresentations.
• Detailed lookup
Display complete dictionary entries for theterm: attributes (domain, nuance, etc.), relative
information (derivative words, antonyms, etc.),
and example sentences. These entries are displayed in another window because of the large
amount of information.
• Web search
Display search results from a web search engine. This help translators confirm in which
context the term is used or how to use the term.
• Register term
Register a term to user’s term list. Note thatusers can look up registered terms in QRedit.
7.5 Lookup by keyboard
To display a pop-up window, translators click onterms with their mouse. But mouse operation canbe an obstacle to efficient input of TL texts. Therefore, in QRedit, translators can look up terms byusing only their keyboards. While inputting TL

Figure 6: Lookup by incremental searchtexts, translators can activate a keyboard incremental search method. Figure 6 shows an example of anincremental search when the user has input the firstcharacter ‘s’.
7.6

Customization

The environment for inputting TL texts can greatly
impact the efficiency of translation work. In addition, an optimal environment differs from translator
to translator. So, a flexible customization methodthat meets the needs of various translators is required. In QRedit, users can customize the following factors in their translation input environments.
• Placement of the SL area [left, right, top,bottom]• Width or height of the SL area
• Placement of translation candidate display[inside, left, right] of the SL area
• Synchronized
scroll[both
directions,source→target, target→source, none]
Figure 7 shows an example of a customized QRedit
window. (See Figure 5 for a default window.)

8 User response
As of 3 July, 2009 – three months after we madeMNH and QRedit publicly available – there areabout 600 users and 4 groups registered to MNH, including such major NGOs as Amnesty International
Japan and Democracy Now! Japan.
As quantitatively evaluating the benefit of usingtranslation aid systems is technically a difficult task
(cf. (Macklovitch, 2006)), and as we are dealingthan before.
We have not yet been able to obtain responses
from group users, because they have only started using QRedit recently and thus have not accumulated
sufficient experience to give an informed judgmenton the system.
We also have not been able to evaluate the usability of MNH because it is still under development and
we are now improving its usability based on comments and suggestions from users.
Figure 7: Customized QRedit window

with volunteer translators who are not working on a“time is money” basis but rather wish to reduce thesubjective burden of translation, we carried out qualitative evaluations through e-mail and phone interviews with three users. They are trial users who havebeen using QRedit since before it was made public,
thus have enough experience to give informed judgment on the system.
According to them, without QRedit, the divisionof time for the different elements of translation isroughly: 10 to 30 per cent for dictionary lookup, 10
to 40 per cent for searching the web to obtain information, 20 to 50 per cent for draft translation, and0 to 10 per cent for revision and editing. All in all,around one fourth to half of the time is used for dictionary and web lookup.
Translator A, a novice translator with two years’
experience, said that she feels it takes her an average of 20 per cent and a maximum of 30 per centless time to complete translations using QRedit, withthe clear additional benefit that the quality of drafttranslations is improved because she can concentrateon context/paragraph reading rather than dictionary
lookup in making draft translations. Translator B, a
middle level translator with three years’ experience,
also reported an average 25 per cent to 30 per centreduction in the overall translation time, with thesame effect on quality as translator A. Translator C,
who is an expert translator, reported that she prefers
the environment she is familiar with for translatingeasier texts, but can reduce translation time by 20
per cent when dealing with other texts. She said that
QRedit enables her to tackle a wider variety of texts

9 Related work
Related work can be roughly classified into three
types, i.e. projects that aim at translation and publishing translated documents; work that is concernedwith hosting translated documents, often multilingually; and work that is addressed at aiding translators and translation communities.
There are too many joint or collaborative onlinetranslation projects to mention here. GlobalVoices
Online4 is perhaps one of the most well known,
along with TUP5 (Translators United for Peace).
Most projects do not provide translation aid facilities or collaborative working environments. They
are rather projects defined by interested groups ofpeople, using existing facilities.
An example of the second category is
Yakushite.net (Shimohata et al., 2001). It provides a collaborative translation environment inwhich users can use MT for translation, while contributing to collaborative terminology augmentation
for the improvement of MT. Except for providing
the MT engine, the translation aid functions are
weak. Worldwide Lexicon (McConnell, 2007) isanother example. Within the project a variety ofmechanisms are provided that facilitate the sharingof translated documents world wide, with which
one can (i) detect translated texts, if there areany; (ii) translate by oneself; (iii) subscribe to an
RSS feed for translation; and (iv) use machinetranslation. The system, however, does not provide
rich facilities to aid human translations (step (ii)).
As such, the system is more a hosting service rather
than a translation aid system.
4

http://globalvoicesonline.org/
http://groups.yahoo.co.jp/group/
TUP-Bulletin/5We are also witnessing the rapid growth of Wikibased platforms to facilitate collaborative translations, such as Traduwiki (related projects arelisted in http://wiki-translation.com/
tiki-index.php) and BEYtrans (Bey et al.,2008). They provide functions that support collaboration among translators, as well as providing atranslation memory function, thus having the features of translation aid systems as well as translation
hosting functions.
Turning our eyes to fully-fledged translation aid
systems, there are several commercial and noncommercial systems. SDL Trados6 is one of themost well known and widely used. SDL also developed Idiom WorldServer system7 , an online multilingual document management system with translation memory functions. There are many other systems such as TransType (Macklovitch, 2006) andthe free translation memory and terminology management system Omega-T8 . Though it is now a little
dated, Gow (2003) evaluates different translation aid
systems.
The functions that MNH provides are closer tothose provided by Idiom WorldServer or Wiki-based
collaborative translation aid systems, but MNH provides a high-quality bilingual dictionary and functions for seamless Wikipedia and web searches
within the integrated translation aid editor QRedit,
thus providing connections to the existing reference information infrastructure that online translators use. This reflects the fact that the main target of MNH is online documents available under
the Creative Commons licenses. On the other hand,collaborative, project-oriented document management functions are weak in MNH, because MNH
basically assumes use by individual translators or
smaller groups. Implementing this functionality will
be a future task.

10Conclusion

We have developed a web site called Minna no
Hon’yaku (MNH, “Translation for Everyone by Everyone”), which hosts online volunteer translators.
Its core features are (1) a blog-like look and feel;6

http://www.translationzone.com/
http://www.idiominc.com/en/8
http://www.omegat.org/
7(2) the legal sharing of translations; (3) high quality, comprehensive language resources; and (4) thetranslation aid editor; QRedit. Translators who use
QRedit daily reported an up to 30 per cent reductionof their overall translation time. We are now running
MNH to see if it can attract and host many volunteer
translators. Please join MNH!

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