Machine Translation in Europe and North
America:brief account of current status and future
prospects
PROFILEJohn Hutchins

W. John Hutchins is the author of articles and books on linguistics, information
retrieval, and in particular machine translation - many available from his website(http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk). He is active in the European Association for
Machine Translation (president 1995-2004) and the International Association for
Machine Translation (president, 1999-2001).

Abstract: The aim of using computers for translation is not to emulate or rival human translation but to produce roughtranslations which can serve as drafts for published translations, as means for accessing foreign-language information, andas cross-language communication aids. The field of machine translation(MT)covers the usage, research and developmentof computer aids and systems, ranging from production systems for large corporations to Internet aids for individuals.
Keywords: Machine translation, Europe, America

ual ‘occasional’ users, e.g. for identifying the main content

The recent growth of MTof foreign texts or for communicating in other languages.
Professional translators, translation agencies and smaller

Since its beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, the tradition-companies prefer computer-based translation tools, andal use of MT is the production of translations of technicalin particular translator workstations, often referred to bydocumentation, e.g. for multinational companies. Systems

their most distinctive component as ‘translation memory’

produce ‘raw’ versions of variable quality which have thensystems many developed initially by European compa-to be revised (‘post-edited’) by translators or by subject

nies. The most widely used currently are: SDL, Transit,

experts knowing the original language. Post-editing canDéà Vu, MultiTrans, LogiTerm, Wordfast, andbe expensive, and many companies using MT adopt aProMemoria. Each offer similar ranges of facilities andcost-effective alternative, the pre-editing of input texts

functions: multilingual split-screen word processing; termi-(typically with a controlled ‘regularized’ language) with the

nology recognition, retrieval and management; creation

aim of minimizing incorrect MT output and reduce (orand use of translation memories (bilingual text corpora ofeliminating) editing processes. An important development

previous translations and their originals); and support forof this usage, now expanding rapidly (with millions of

all European and many Asian languages, both as source

translated pages every year), is the integration of transla-and target languages. Finally, and not least, workstations

tion with technical authoring, printing and publishing.

provide access to fully automatic translation if and when

Although MT software for personal computers began torequired.

appear in the early 1980s, sales were relatively low until

The Internet has produced a rapidly growing demand forthe mid 1990s. The quality is not good enough for profes-

real-time on-line translation. The need is for fast acquisi-

sional translation, but it is found to be adequate for individ-

tion of foreign-language information; and top quality out-222

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put is not at all essential. Many PC-based systems are

Most of the systems mentioned above are available in dif-marketed for the translation of Web pages and of elec-

ferent versions such as ‘corporate’ or ‘enterprise’ for large

tronic mail, and there is great and increasing usage of MT

companies; ‘professional’ for independent professional

services (many free), such as the well-known ‘Babelfish’translators; and ‘home’ or ‘personal’ for occasional users,

on AltaVista and now also available on Yahoo. Otherse.g. for translating Web pages and emails.

include FreeTranslation, Google Translator, Tarjim,

Apart from commercial systems there continue to be cus-

WorldLingo, and many more are being added both for

tom-built systems for company-internal use or for corpo-

specific language pairs and for the ‘major’ languages

rate clients. In the United States, the PAHO (Pan(English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese,

American Health Organization) developed on-site sys-Korean, Chinese).

tems for English and Spanish in the early 1980s, followed
later by English-Portuguese; the Smart Corporation continues to develop customized systems for most European

MT in Europe and North
Americalanguages for large corporate clients; and European
providers of custom-built systems include ESTeam andPC-based MT software is available from a large number

Xplanation n.v., the latter specializing in controlled-lan-of European and North American vendors and covering

guage systems.

virtually all European language pairs. Here we can men-Many large translation services and multinational compa-tion only the most notable (for a full listing see thenies use MT systems for translating large volumes ofCompendium of translation software at http://www.

texts, e.g. in the United States government institutions

hutchinsweb.me.uk/ Compendium.htm). Nearly all cover(DARPA, USAF, etc.) and large corporations (Xerox,the major European languages (English, French, German,Ford, General Motors, etc.). Major users in Europe are

Italian, Spanish), and many of them also translate fromcompanies such as SAP and Siemens, and in particularless common Languages (Greek, Polish, Russian,the European Commission.

Hungarian, Turkish, etc.) and from and into Arabic,

One of the most distinctive features of the European

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. In addition, there arescene are translation companies providing localisation ofmany systems specifically designed for particular lan-documentation and products

guage pairs: English-German (Personal Translator PT),

acquired considerable experience in the use of translation

English-Italian (PeTra), English-Finnish (TranSmart),

aids and MT systems. Related to this activity is the devel-

Arabic-English (Al-Mutarjim Al-Arabey, Al-Nakil, Al-Wafi);

opment of software for the localisation of websites. With

French-German (FB-Active), German-Russian (PROMT),

the growth of the Internet, many companies offer informa-

Russian-Ukrainian (PARS), Portuguese-Spanish andtion about their products and services, which increasingly

otherneeds to be made available in other languages. The infor-languages(interNOSTRUM), etc.

(Falatudo),

Catalan-Spanish

these companies havemation has to be updated regularly, and software such as

Machine Translation in Europe and North America:
brief account of current status and future prospects
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IBM Websphere has been developed specifically fortranslation units are larger than individual words or shorttranslating webpages as and when required.

word sequences; input sentences are matched against

Automatic translation of news websites is growing in bothphrases or clauses (examples) in the corpus, then equiva-

Europe and North America. Most companies involved

lent phrases in the target language are extracted, andapply customized versions of MT software supplied by theadapted and combined in acceptable output sentences.

major vendors such as Systran.

Both methods make substantial use of large bilingual cor-In contrast to the situation in Japan and other Asian coun-pora, but where SMT is based exclusively on statisticaltries, the application of MT to patents has been relatively

correlations, EBMT applies both statistical techniques andneglected. There are only two systems specifically forlinguistics-based methods similar to those of earliertranslating patents: the PaTrans developed for LingTech

RBMT approaches.

A/S to translate English patents into Danish; and APTrans

Significant ‘by-products’ of this corpus-based research

designed for generating multilingual patent claims fromhave been developments of aids for translators, not justcontrolled English language input.

improvements in translation memories, their creation andexploitation, but also systems for error detection and correction and for automatic text prediction, i.e. suggestions

MT research

for text completion to aid human translators who frequently translate similar technical documents.

Until the mid 1990s, most MT research was still based on

Although most MT researchers are aiming still forthe implementation of lexical and grammar rules (withautonomous translation systems, where human interven-translation via an interlingua or at least ‘deep structure’tion is minimal, there are also many researching dialogue-representations) in what is now called rule-based machine

based and computer-interactive systems, including thetranslation (RBMT). Currently, the dominant paradigms ofuse of controlled or ‘regularized’ input with the aim of

MT research are corpus-based. In statistical machine

ensuring higher quality output.

translation (SMT), words and ‘phrases’ (sequences of two

The most innovative area of current research is automaticor three words) from a bilingual corpus (of original texts

translation of spoken language. The main centres areand their translations) are aligned as the basis for a ‘trans-ATR in Japan, the Carnegie-Mellon University (USA), thelation model’ of word-word (and phrase-phrase) frequen-

University of Karlsruhe (Germany), all collaborating in acies. Translation involves the selection of the most proba-

project (C-STAR consortium) to develop speaker-inde-

ble words in the target language for each input word andpendent real-time telephone translation systems forthe determination of the most probable sequence of theJapanese, English and German - initially for hotel reserva-

selected words (on the basis of a monolingual ‘language

tion and conference registration transactions. Until recent-model’). Example-based machine translation (EBMT)ly, there was also in Germany the government-funded

involves similar alignment of bilingual data, but here theVerbmobil project to develop a portable aid for business

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negotiations (German, Japanese, English). Speech trans-quality human translations from people who have previ-lation attracts much publicity, but few observers expect

ously had no exposure to translation facilities.

dramatic developments in the near future. While we canHowever, for the translation of those texts where the qual-envisage MT of speech in highly constrained domains

ity of output is much less important, machine translation is(e.g. telephone enquiries, banking transactions, computer

often an ideal or even the only solution. For example, toinput) it seems unlikely that automatic speech translation

produce translations of scientific and technical documents

will extend to open-ended interpersonal communication.

that may be read by only one person who wants to merely

The accession of states in Central and Eastern Europe tofind out general background information and/or specificthe European Union has stimulated research on MT anddata, MT will increasingly be the only answer. And theretranslation tools for languages such as Czech, Polish,

are new applications where human translation has never

Hungarian, Slovenian, Estonian and Bulgarian. Mention

featured: the production of draft versions for authors writ-should also be made of research on systems for 'minority'

ing in a foreign language; the real-time translation of tele-languages in Europe, such as Basque, Catalan andvision subtitles; the translation of information from data-

Galician in Spain and immigrant languages such as Hindi,bases; the on-line translation of Web pages; the transla-

Bengali and Gujarati in the United Kingdom.

tion of electronic mail; etc.

MT and human translation

MT in the future

Machine translation is demonstrably cost-effective for

The Internet will drive changes in the nature and applica-large scale and/or rapid translation of (boring) technicaltion of MT. What users of Internet services are seeking is

documentation, (highly repetitive) software localization

information, in whatever language it may have been writ-manuals, and many other situations where the costs often or stored

MT plus essential human preparation and revision, or theUsers will want seamless integration of information

costs of using computerized translation tools (worksta-retrieval, extraction and summarization systems with auto-tions, etc.), are significantly less than those of traditional

matic translation. There is now increasingly active

human translation with no computer aids.

research in such areas as cross-lingual information

By contrast, the human translator is (and will remain) unri-retrieval, multilingual summarization, multilingual text gen-valled for non-repetitive linguistically sophisticated texts

eration from databases, and so forth and, before many(e.g. in literature and law), and even for one-off texts inyears, there may well be systems available commercially

specific highly specialized technical subjects. Indeed, it isand on the Internet.

probable that the ready availability of low-quality MT out-

While all-purpose MT systems will continue to be devel-put from Internet services will create a demand for high-oped and marketed it seems probable that in future years

translation is just a means to that end.

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brief account of current status and future prospects
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there will be many computer-based tools and applications

Future (Chichester: Ellis Horwood, 1986); An Introduction

where automatic translation is just one component.

to Machine Translation [with Harold Somers] (London:

Integrated translation software would then be available

Academic Press, 1992); Editor of MT News International

not only for the large corporation but also for anyone from(1991-1997); Compiler of Compendium of Translation

their own computer (whether desktop, laptop, or network-

Software (now on his website) (2000 to the present) andbased, etc.) and from any device (television, mobile tele-of the Machine Translation Archive (http://www.mt-phone, PDA, etc.) accessing services on computer net-archive.info) (2004 to the present); Editor of Early years inworks.

Machine Translation: Memoirs and Biographies ofExisting systems have been developed for well-written

Pioneers (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000).

scientific and technical documents and assume humanpost-editing. Internet usage demands systems specificallyfor the kind of colloquial (often ill formed and badlyspelled) messages found in emails and chat rooms. The
old linguistics rule-based (RBMT) approaches are probably not equal to the task on their own, and we may expect
corpus-based methods making use of the voluminous
data available on the Internet itself as the basis of futuresystems for this application.
Corpus-based methods promise more rapid developmentof systems, as well as overcoming the inevitable deficiencies of human-produced rule-based approaches.
Although SMT research now dominates MT research, thegreat majority of commercial systems are RBMT systems.
Few SMT systems have reached public operational status. The leader has been Language Weaver offeringtranslation systems for Arabic, Chinese, French, German,Persian, Romanian, Spanish, etc. to and from English.
Most recently, the online ‘Google Translate’ service hasbegan offering its own internally-developed SMT system
for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean into English
using the resources of Google’s massive text databases.

Principal works: Machine Translation: Past, Present,

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対訳コーパスを用いたコーパスベースである。

欧州と北米における機械翻訳―現状と将来予想についての簡潔な説明―

・統計的MTは、対訳コーパスを統計処理して語と語の頻度、句と句の頻度情報を利用する。
・コーパスベースは人手翻訳者の校正支援としても利用

MTの最近の進展
・80年代からPC版のMTソフトが販売されだした。

されている。

・翻訳家、翻訳業者、中小企業では、コンピュータベー

・用例ベースMTは翻訳単位が語彙や短い句を対象とす

スの機械翻訳支援システム、なかんずく「翻訳メモリ」

るコーパスベースに比較してより大きな単位である句が利用されている。

や節を対象にしている。

・機械翻訳の機能だけでなく、技術文書のオーサリング

・話し言葉のMTは大衆の興味を惹きつけているが、オシステム、印刷、出版と組み合わせた統合翻訳システ

ープンな環境での普及には懐疑的な意見が多い。
・欧州では、EUへの新規加入国の言語や方言も対象にムに発展している。
・インターネットの普及で、Webページの翻訳ニーズなっている。
MTと人手翻訳が高まり、フリーな翻訳サービスが出現した。

・MTは、大量で迅速、リアルタイムの翻訳に適してい欧州と北米におけるMT
・欧米では、多くのMT販売業者が存在している。一覧は、
http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/Compendium.

る。特に繰り返しの多いマニュアルのローカライゼーションに適している。
・人手翻訳は、高品質な翻訳で、文学、法律、一回限りhtm に掲載している。
・対象言語は、欧米の主流の言語（英仏独伊西）、非主流の言語（ギリシャ語、ロシア語、トルコ語等）、アの高度に専門化した分野のドキュメントのような錬られた文章が主対象である。
・MTの新しい応用としては、外国語で書いている著者ラビア語、中国語、日本語、韓国語等である。
・ユーザ分類では、大企業版、翻訳専門家版、個人版にのためのドラフト版の作成、TV字幕のリアルタイム翻訳、データベースやWebページのリアルタイム翻分かれる。
・特定顧客向けのMT開発もある。北米ではPAHO（パ訳、eメール等である。

ンアメリカンヘルス機構）の英語-スペイン語、英語-将来のMTポルトガル語があり、欧州では、制限言語の業者もい・インターネットが大きな刺激となっている。多言語翻訳によるクロス検索、分析、要約とMTの結合、あるる。
・大口利用者としては、DARPA、USAF、XEROX、いはユビキタスな環境でのMTである。
・話し言葉の翻訳は非文が多く、ルールベースMTではFORD、GM、SAP、シーメンス、ECである。
・日本や他のアジアと対照的に、特許機械翻訳業者は2対応できないのでコーパスベース方式が中心である。
・MT商品の主流はルールベース翻訳である。

社しかない。

・統計的MTの商品は殆どない。LangWeaver社はこのMT研究
・90年代半ばまで、辞書と文法によるルールベースMTが中心であったが、現在の中心的なパラダイムは、分野のリーダであったが、最近Google翻訳サービスが始まった。独自に開発した統計的MTを用いている。

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