Helping Volunteer Translators, Fostering Language Resources
Kyo Kageura
Eiichiro Sumita
Takeshi Abekawa
Masao Utiyama
Tokyo UniversityNational Institute
MASTAR Project
MASTAR Project
NICTNICTof Informatics
Keihanna Science City 2-1-2, 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, Japanabekawa@nii.ac.jp eiichiro.sumita@nict.go.jp kyo@p.u-tokyo.ac.jp
mutiyama@nict.go.jp

Abstract
This paper introduces a website called
Minna no Hon’yaku (MNH, “Translationfor All”), which hosts online volunteer
translators. Its core features are (1) aset of translation aid tools, (2) high quality, comprehensive language resources,and (3) the legal sharing of translations.
As of May 2010, there are about 1200
users and 4 groups registered to MNH.
The groups using it include such major
NGOs as Amnesty International Japanand Democracy Now! Japan.

1

Figure 1: Screenshot of “Minna no Hon’yaku”
site (http://trans-aid.jp)

Introduction

This paper introduces a website called Minnano Hon’yaku (MNH, “Translation for All”, Figure 1), which hosts online volunteer translators(Utiyama et al., 2009).1 Its core features are (1) aset of translation aid tools, (2) high quality, comprehensive language resources, and (3) the legal
sharing of translations.
First, the translation aid tools in MNH consist of the translation aid editor, QRedit, a bilingual concordancer, and a bilingual term extraction tool. These tools help volunteer translators
to translate their documents easily as describedin Section 3. These tools also produce language
resources that are useful for natural language
processing as the byproduct of their use as described in Section 4.
1

Currently, MNH hosts volunteer translators who translate Japanese (English) documents into English (Japanese).
The English and Japanese interfaces are available at http://trans-aid.jp/en and http://trans-aid.
jp/ja, respectively.

Second, MNH provides comprehensive language resources, which are easily looked up inQRedit. MNH, in cooperation with Sanseido,provides “Grand Concise English Japanese Dictionary” (Sanseido, 2001) and plans to provide“Grand Concise Japanese English Dictionary”(Sanseido, 2002) in fiscal year 2010. These dictionaries have about 360,000 and 320,000 entries, respectively, and are widely accepted as
standard and comprehensive dictionaries amongtranslators. MNH also provides seamless accessto the web. For example, MNH provides a dictionary that was made from the English Wikipedia.
This enable translators to reference Wikipedia
articles during the translation process as if they
are looking up dictionaries.
Third, MNH uses Creative Commons Licenses (CCLs) to help translators share theirtranslations. CCLs are essential for sharing andopening translations.

Figure 2: Screenshot of QRedit

2Related work

There are many translation support tools, such
as Google Translator Toolkit, WikiBABEL (Kumaran et al., 2009), BEYtrans (Bey et al., 2008),
Caitra (Koehn, 2009) and Idiom WorldServersystem,2 an online multilingual document management system with translation memory functions.
The functions that MNH provides are closer
to those provided by Idiom WorldServer, but
MNH provides a high-quality bilingual dictionaries and functions for seamless Wikipedia andweb searches within the integrated translation
aid editor QRedit. It also enables translators toshare their translations, which are also used aslanguage resources.

3Helping Volunteer translators

This section describes a set of translation aid
tools installed in MNH.
3.1 QRedit
QRedit is a translation aid system which is designed for volunteer translators working mainly
online (Abekawa and Kageura, 2007). When a
URL of a source language (SL) text is given toQRedit, it loads the corresponding text into theleft panel, as shown in Figure 2. Then, QRedit
automatically looks up all words in the SL text.
When a user clicks an SL word, its translation
candidates are displayed in a pop-up window.
2

http://www.idiominc.com/en/

Figure 3: Screenshot of bilingual concordancer

3.2 Bilingual concordancer
The translations published on MNH are used
to make a parallel corpus by using a sentencealignment method (Utiyama and Isahara, 2003).
MNH also has parallel texts from the Amnesty
International Japan, Democracy Now! Japan,and open source software manuals (Ishisaka etal., 2009). These parallel texts are searched byusing a simple bilingual concordancer as shownin Figure 3.
3.3 Bilingual term extraction tool
MNH has a bilingual term extraction tool thatis composed of a translation estimation tool
(Tonoike et al., 2006) and a term extraction tool
(Nakagawa and Mori, 2003).
First, we apply the translation estimation tool
to extract Japanese term candidates and their English translation candidates. Next, we apply theterm extraction tool to extract English term candidates. If these English term candidates arefound in the English translation candidates, then,we accept these term candidates as the translations of those Japanese term candidates.

4 Fostering language resources
Being a “one stop” translation aid tool for online translators, MNH incorporates mechanisms
which enable users to naturally foster important translation resources, i.e. terminological resources and translation logs.

4.1 Terminological resources
As with most translation-aid systems, MNH provides functions that enable users to register theirown terminologies. Users can assign the statusof availability to the registered terms. They cankeep the registered terms for private use, makethem available for a specified group of people,
or make them publicly available. Several NGO
groups are using MNH for their translation activities. For instance, Amnesty International, whichuses MNH, maintains a list of term translationsin the field of human rights by which translators
should abide. Thus groups such as Amnesty upload a pre-compiled list of terms and make themavailable among volunteers. It is our assumption
and aim that these groups make their terminological resources not only available among thegroup but also publicly available, which will create win-win situation: NGOs and other groups
which make their lists of terms available will
have more chance of recruiting volunteer translators, while MNH has more chance of attracting
further users.
At the time of writing this paper (May 2010),
56,319 terms are registered, of which 45,843 aremade publicly available. More than 80 per centof the registered terms are made public. Currently, MNH does not identify duplicated terms
registered by different users, but when the number of registered terms become larger, this andother aspects of quality control of registeredterms will become an important issue.
4.2 Translation corpus
Another important language resources accumulated on MNH is the translation corpus. As
mentioned in the introduction, being a hosting
site, MNH naturally accumulates source and target documents with a clear copyright status. Of
particular importance in MNH, however, is thatit can accumulate a corpus that contains draft
and final translations made by human together
with their source texts (henceforth SDF corpus
for succinctness). This type of corpus is important and useful, because it can be used forthe training of inexperienced translators (for instance, the MeLLANGE corpus, which contains

different versions of translation, is well known
for its usefulness in translator training (MeLLANGE, 2009)) and also because it provides
a useful information for improving the performance of machine translation and translation-aidsystems. While the importance of such corpora
has been widely recognized, the construction ofsuch a corpus is not easy because the data are
not readily available due to the reluctance on theside of translators of releasing the draft translation data.
The basic mechanisms of accumulating SDF
corpus is simple. Translators using MNH savetheir translations to keep the data when they finish the translation. MNH keeps the log of up
to 10 versions of translation for each document.
MNH introduced two saving modes, i.e. snapshot mode and normal mode. The translation
version saved in the normal mode is overwritten when the next version is saved. Translation
versions saved in snapshot mode are retained, up
to 10 versions. Translators can thus consciously
keep the versions of their translations.
MNH can collect not only draft and final translations made by a single translator, but also thosemade by different translators. MNH has a function that enables users to give permission forother translators registered with MNH to edit
their original translations, thus facilitating thecollaborative translations. Such permission canbe open-ended, or restricted to a particular groupof users.
This function is of particular importancefor NGOs, NPOs, university classes and othergroups involved in group-based translation. In
these groups, it is a common process in translation that a draft translation is first made by inexperienced translators, which is then revised andfinalized by experienced translators. If an inexperienced translator gives permission of editing
his/her draft translations to experienced translators, the logs of revisions, including the draft andfinal versions, will be kept on MNH database.
This is particularly important and useful forthe self-training of inexperienced translators andthus potentially extremely effective for NGOs
and other groups that rely heavily on volunteer

hosts online volunteer translators. We plan to extend MNH to other language pairs in our futurework.

References
Abekawa, Takeshi and Kyo Kageura. 2007. QRedit:
An integrated editor system to support online volunteer translators. In Digital humanities, pages 3–5.

Figure 4: Comparative view of different translation versions

translators. Many NGOs face chronically theproblem of a paucity of good volunteer translators. The retention rate of volunteer translators islow, which increase the burden of a small number of experienced translators, leaving them notime to give advice to inexperienced translators,
which further reduce the retention rate of volunteers. To overcome this vicious cycle, mechanisms to enable inexperienced volunteer translators to train themselves in the cycle of actualtranslation activities is urgently needed and expected to be highly effective. MNH provides acomparative view function of any pairwise translation versions of the same document, as shownin Figure 4. Translators can check which parts
are modified very easily through the comparative view screen, which can effectively works as
a transfer of translation knowledge from experienced translators to inexperienced translators.
At the time of writing this paper, MNH contains 1850 documents that have more than one
translation versions, of which 764 are published.
The number of documents translated by a group(more than one translator) is 110, of which 48 arepublished. Although the number of translations
made by more than one translators is relatively
small, they are steadily increasing both in number and in ratio.

5Conclusion

We have developed a website called Minna noHon’yaku (MNH, “Translation for All”), which

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