Outline of Machine Translation Developments
in Europe and America
EAMT and IAMTPROFILEJohn Hutchins

W. John Hutchins is the author of articles and books on linguistics, information retrieval, and in particularmachine translation - many available from his website (http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk). He is active in theEuropean Association for Machine Translation (president 1995-2004) and the International Association for
Machine Translation (president, 1999-2001).
Principal works: Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future (Chichester: Ellis Horwood, 1986); An Introduction
to Machine Translation [with Harold Somers] (London: Academic Press, 1992); Editor of Early years in MachineTranslation: Memoirs and Biographies of Pioneers (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000); Editor of MT NewsInternational (1991-1997); Compiler of Compendium of Translation Software (2000 to the present) and of theMachine Translation Archive (2004 to the present).

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Abstract : This review of developments inMany large translation services and multinational

machine translation (MT) covers the usage andcompanies use MT systems for translating

development of computer aids and systems,

large volumes of texts, e.g. in the United Statesproduction systems for large corporations, Internet

government institutions (DARPA, USAF, etc.) andaids for individuals, and the wide range of researchlarge corporations (Xerox, Ford, General Motors,activity in Europe and North America.

etc.). Major users in Europe are companies
such as SAP and Siemens, and in particular theKeywords: Machine translation, Europe, America

European Commission.

Types of systems and tools

Professional translators, translation agencies

Commercial MT systems are widely available inand smaller companies prefer computer-based

Europe and North America in three basic versions:translation tools, and in particular translator‘corporate’or‘enterprise’versions for large

workstations, often referred to by their mostcompanies;‘professional’versions for independent

distinctive component as 'translation memory'

professional translators; and‘home’or‘personal’

systems - many developed initially by European

systems for occasional users, e.g. for translatingcompanies. The most widely used currently are:

Web pages and emails. The‘home’systems are

SDL, Transit, Déjà Vu, MultiTrans, LogiTerm,

the most basic type, consisting of little more

Wordfast, and ProMemoria. Each offer similar

than the core translation engine. The corporate

ranges of facilities and functions: multilingual split-systems include many additional aids, for pre- andscreen word processing; terminology recognition,

post-editing of texts, for terminology management,

retrieval and management; creation and use

for project control, etc. The‘professional’systemsof translation memories (bilingual text corpora

provide a selection of those facilities found to beof previous translations and their originals);

most suitable for translators.

and support for all European and many Asian

250

25th ANNIVERSARYOnline services, electronic mailFinally, and not least, workstations provide access

The provision of translation on-line is now wellto fully automatic translation if and when required.

established. The need is for fast acquisition offoreign-language information; and top quality
output is not at all essential. Many MT systems

developments from MT research. Examples areare marketed for the translation of Web pages

authoring systems to help writers to compose

and of electronic mail, and there is great andtexts suitable for MT treatment, and systems

increasing usage of MT services (many free),for producing‘controlled language’texts (i.e.

such as the well-known 'Babelfish' available on

conforming to MT-friendly syntax and to standard

Yahoo. Others include FreeTranslation, Googleterminology) - the pre-processing of texts input toTranslator, Bing Translator, Tarjim, WorldLingo,

MT systems is an increasing feature of corporate

and many more online services are being added,usage. Other examples are systems for error

both for specific language pairs and for the‘major’detection and correction (of both input and output

languages (English, French, German, Spanish,texts), and systems for automatic text predictionArabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese).

(e.g. TransType), which provide suggestions fortext completion to aid human translators who

The translation of electronic mail has been offeredfrequently translate similar technical documents.

on most PC based MT software, but it is clear theThese developments are closely linked to efforts‘ungrammatical’and colloquial language of email

to improve access and retrieval of terms and texts

demands more specialised software. To meetfrom translation memories.

this need, the Translution company is marketingcustomized software for translation of company-One of the most distinctive features of theinternal email communication.

European scene are translation companies
providing localisation of documentation andPatents

products - these companies have acquired

In contrast to the situation in Japan and otherconsiderable experience in the use of translation

Asian countries, the application of MT to European

aids and MT systems. Related to this activity ispatents has only recently been discussed.

the development of software for the localisation

Consequently there are only three systemsof websites. With the growth of the Internet, many

specifically for translating patents: the PaTrans

companies offer information about their products

and SpaTrans systems developed for LingTechand services, which increasingly needs to be madeA/S to translate English patents into Danish; andavailable in other languages. The information has

the APTrans system designed for generating

to be updated regularly, and software such as IBM

multilingual patent claims from controlled English

Websphere has been developed specifically forlanguage input.

translating webpages as and when required.
The statistics-based SpaTrans system has

YEAR BOOK 2O1O 251

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機械翻訳技術の向上

Most computer aids for translators are

寄稿集

languages, both as source and target languages.

been evaluated in comparison with the rule-in the target language for each input word and thebased PaTrans system developed in the 1990s

determination of the most probable sequence offrom the Eurotra model. In general, the output

the selected words (on the basis of a monolingual

quality compares well with the older rule-based‘language model’). Example-based machine

system; however, the major problem remains thetranslation (EBMT) involves similar alignment

occurrence of new terminology, resulting in manyof bilingual data, but here the translation units‘unknown’words in the output.

are larger than individual words or short word
sequences; input sentences are matched against

There has been increasing research interest in thephrases or clauses (examples) in the corpus,

issues involved in patent translation. Workshops

then equivalent phrases in the target languageon the topic have been held at the MT Summits inare extracted, and adapted and combined in

2005, 2007, and 2009. The particular features of

acceptable output sentences. Both methods

patent texts (long sentences, novel terminology)

make substantial use of large bilingual corpora,and the problems of searching for patent claims

but where SMT is based exclusively on statisticalhave been well aired in these conferences andcorrelations, EBMT applies both statisticalin other contributions. The specific needs of thetechniques and linguistics-based methods similar

European Patent Office and of other patent offices

to those of earlier RBMT approaches.

have been the subject of a number of papers
covering plans for services and projects; andThe advantages of SMT are that systems canrecently, the European Commission has approved

be developed rapidly, with relatively scarce

support for the PluTO (patent language translation

data, and for languages previously ignored byonline) project at Dublin City University.

RBMT. Initial difficulties with languages having
rich morphologies and non-European syntactic

MT research

structures are being increasingly overcome, andUntil the mid 1990s, most MT research was

SMT systems are now performing as well as (orstill based on the implementation of lexical andbetter than) RBMT systems. Performance andgrammar rules (with translation via an interlingua

progress is measured by evaluation metrics,or at least‘deep structure’representations) insuch as BLEU, NIST, METEOR, HTER, etc. These

what is now called rule-based machine translation

metrics enable researchers to monitor the(RBMT). Currently, the dominant paradigms of MT

effectiveness of alternative models and processes,

research are corpus-based. In statistical machine

to compare SMT systems and to compare themtranslation (SMT), words and‘phrases’(sequenceswith RBMT systems. However, it can be arguedof two or three words) from a bilingual corpus (ofthat metrics developed for SMT are inherently

original texts and their translations) are aligned

biased against RBMT systems, since the quality

as the basis for a‘translation model’of word-of the latter is often ranked higher by humanword (and phrase-phrase) frequencies. Translation

judges.

involves the selection of the most probable words

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25th ANNIVERSARY

寄稿集

Although SMT research now dominates MTBasque.

research, the great majority of commercial
A related aspect is the design of systems withhave reached public operational status. The leader

multiple engines (different types of SMT systems,has been Language Weaver offering translation

e.g. some with morphological analysis, somesystems for Arabic, Chinese, French, German,

using dependency representations, some as

Persian, Romanian, Spanish, etc. to and from‘basic’phrase-based systems). In other cases,

English. Online services are now predominantly

RBMT systems have combined with SMT

SMT-based, e.g.‘Google Translate’,‘Bingsystems. The results have been‘hybrid’‘multi,Translate’(previously‘Windows Live Translator’),engine’or‘combination’systems (the terminology‘Babelfish’(now on the Yahoo site).

fluctuates), in which the final translation isderived from a combination of the outputs of eachCollaboration, open sourcecomponent system.

Probably the most significant development in MT
research in Europe is the establishment of theSpeech

Euromatrix project (based at Edinburgh University).

The most innovative area of current research is

Its aim is the development of open-source MT

automatic translation of spoken language. The

technologies applicable to all language pairs

main centres are ATR in Japan, the Carnegie-within Europe, based on hybrid designs combining

Mellon University (USA), the University of Karlsruhestatistical and rule-based methods. There will(Germany), all collaborating in a project (C-STARbe a particular emphasis on languages of newconsortium) to develop speaker-independent real-

member states of the European Union, and ontime telephone translation systems for Japanese,

systems for translating technical, social and legal

English and German - initially for hotel reservation

documentation.

and conference registration transactions. The
government-funded Verbmobil project in Germany

Euromatrix is not the only example of collaboration.

intended for business negotiations in German,

A major feature of recent SMT research is theJapanese, and English, has now ended. Speech

availability of tools such as parsers and evaluationtranslation continues to attract much publicity,metrics as open source materials. Examples arebut few observers expect dramatic developments

Moses, GIZA, Joshua, BLEU, NIST, METEOR, allin the near future. While we can envisage MT

widely used by researchers and thus facilitatingof speech in highly constrained domains (e.g.

not just rapid development but also comparative

telephone enquiries, banking transactions,evaluations and progress. Following thesecomputer input) it seems unlikely that automatic

examples, RBMT and EBMT researchers arespeech translation will extend to open-ended

now also using open source materials - perhaps

interpersonal communication.

best known is the Apertium framework, used forsystems for Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese andYEAR BOOK 2O1O 253

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機械翻訳技術の向上

systems are RBMT systems. Few SMT systems

Languages

MT in the future

MT software is available from a large number

Machine translation is demonstrably cost-effectiveof European and North American vendors andfor large scale and/or rapid translation of technicalcovering virtually all European language pairs.

documentation, (highly repetitive) software

Here we can mention only the most notable (forlocalization manuals, and many other situations

a full listing see the Compendium of translation

where the costs of MT plus essential human

software at http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/

preparation and revision, or the costs of using

Compendium.htm). Nearly all cover the major

computerized translation tools (workstations, etc.),

European languages (English, French, German,

are significantly less than those of traditional

Italian, Spanish), and many of them also translate

human translation with no computer aids. Thisfrom less common Languages (Greek, Polish,

usage is growing and will continue to grow with

Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.) and from andglobalization.

into Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.
For the translation of texts where the quality of
In Europe there is particular need for translation

output is not important, machine translation istools for languages of the central and easternoften the only solution. For example, it will always

states of the European Union, e.g. Czech, Polish,

be uneconomic to produce human translations

Hungarian, Latvian, Slovenian, Estonian andof scientific and technical documents just for

Bulgarian. There has also been research on

general background information and/or specificsystems for 'minority' languages in Europe, suchdata. In these cases, MT will increasingly be

as Basque, Catalan and Galician in Spain and forthe only answer. And there are new applications

immigrant languages such as Hindi, Bengali andwhere human translation has never featured: theGujarati in the United Kingdom.

production of draft versions for authors writing
in a foreign language; the real-time translation ofThe interest of the US government bodies focusestelevision subtitles; the translation of informationon the use of MT in conjunction with informationfrom databases; the on-line translation of Web

gathering and analysis. Hence, their support forpages; the translation of electronic mail; etc.

SMT research in Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, etc.
There are particular problems involving recognition

The Internet will drive changes in the natureof names, differences of transliteration, and theand application of MT. What users of Internet

integration of MT with information extraction,

services are seeking is information, in whatever

text mining, intelligence analysis, etc. Researchlanguage it may have been written or stored -on SMT has undoubtedly been stimulated by thistranslation is just a means to that end. Users

governmental involvement.

will want seamless integration of information
retrieval, extraction and summarization systems
with automatic translation. There is now active
research in cross-lingual information retrieval,254

25th ANNIVERSARY

generation from databases, and so forth.

Existing systems have been developed for well-

欧州と米国における機械翻訳開発の概要
ジョン ハッチンス

have assumed that texts will be post-edited by

アブストラクト：本稿の機械翻訳 (MT) 開発の概要は、

knowledgeable users or translators. Internet

コンピュータ支援システムの利用と開発、大企業向け製

usage demands systems specifically for the kind品システム、個人向けインターネット支援、及び欧州とof colloquial (often ill formed and badly spelled)

米国における広範囲な研究活動を含んだレビューであmessages found in emails and social networking

る。

sites. For such tasks, SMT making use of thevoluminous data available on the Internet itself

種々のシステム及びツールの型

appears to be the only solution.

ここでは、機械翻訳システム及び関連ツールのタイプを分類し、各々の特徴を挙げている。

Information about systems and services
先ず、3 つのタイプに分けている。

Machine Translation Archive (http://www.mtarchive.info)①大企業向け、②プロ翻訳者向け、③一般ユーザ向け

大企業向けは、前編集、後編集、用語管理、プロジェク
ト制御を含んだもので、プロ翻訳者向けは、大企業向けをカスタマイズしたもの、一般ユーザ向けは、コアの翻訳エンジンに限定したもの。

機械翻訳の利用分野として、欧米では、大量のドキュメントを翻訳するために機械翻訳が利用されている。米国
では、政府機関（DARPA、米国空軍、等）と大企業 ( ゼロックス、フォード、GM 等 )、欧州では、大口ユーザの SAP やシーメンスといった民間企業と、特に欧州共同体がその利用部門である。

翻訳家、翻訳会社、小規模企業では、コンピュータベースの翻訳ツール、特に翻訳ワークステーション（翻訳メモリシステムとも呼ばれる）が好まれている。翻訳メモ
リは欧州企業により開発され、現在最も使われているのは、SDL, Transit, Déjà Vu, MaltiTrans, LogiTerm,Wordfast, ProMemoria それらは何れも類似の仕様でYEAR BOOK 2O1O 255

機械翻訳技術の向上

５written scientific and technical documents andmentioned in this review can be found in the

寄稿集

multilingual summarization, multilingual textある。共通的な機能は、多言語分離ワープロ、用語管理、てきたが訳質の評価は同じ程度であった。共通課題は翻訳メモリの作成と利用、全欧州言語と多くのアジア言特許における未知語や長文の処理であった。特許翻訳語からなる言語対である。

への関心が高まり MT サミットでも 2005 年から議論が始まった。欧州特許庁 EPO をはじめ各国の特許庁で翻訳者支援機能の多くは、機械翻訳の研究から生まれてのニーズの高まりで種々のプロポーザルが提出されている。例えば、機械翻訳に向いたオーサリングツールやいる。最近、欧州共同体は、特許言語翻訳オンライン

制限言語、前編集は企業で利用されている。あるいは自PluTO プロジェクトをダブリンシティ大学を中心とす動テキスト予測で入力テキストの間違いを訂正してくれるコンソーシアムに 3 年間、2 百万ユーロの計画で、4る。（TransType では翻訳者に類似のターミノロジー月から開始した。

を示してくれる。）

機械翻訳研究
欧州翻訳シーンにおける特徴は、ドキュメントのローカ

ここでは機械翻訳の研究動向を述べている。

リゼーションで長年の実績があることである。この経験は企業において重要となる多言語版の Web ページ管理

1990 年代半ばまでの中心テーマは、語彙と文法によを必要なときに更新できるシステムに活用されている。

る規則ベース機械翻訳 RBMT であったが、現在の中心IBM の Websphere はその一つである。

パラダイムはコーパスベースである。単語レベルの細かい単位での対応関係を研究する統計ベース機械翻訳

オンラインサービスと電子メール

SMT と句や節、文レベルを対象とする用例ベース機械

ここでは、オンライン翻訳について述べている。

翻訳 EBMT がある。SMT はコーパスが揃えば短期間に開発できるため RBMT では考慮されなかった言語にオンライン翻訳に関する意識あわせが出来つつある。外対しても開発が可能となる。現在、SMT は RBMT と国語の情報をすばやく獲得することで、その訳質には余同等な水準に成長している。しかし商用システムでは、り拘らないものとすることである。多くの機械翻訳シス

圧倒的に RBMT が多い。SMT はほとんど存在しない

テムが Web ページの翻訳や電子メールの翻訳を目標にが、そのリーダ Language Weaver が提供してきた。

している。最近は、インターネットの無料翻訳サービス

オンラインサービスは SMT が独占的である：Google,が増大している。

Bing, Babelfish などである。

電子メールの機械翻訳は多くの機械翻訳システムで翻訳共同作業とオープンソースのターゲットにされているが、文法的にイリーガルな表

ここでは、機械翻訳開発の方法論として、コラボレー現が多くカスタマイズが必要になる。このような市場にション ( 共同作業 ) とオープンソースの重要性を述べてTranslution 社は企業内の電子メール翻訳に特化したいる。

ビジネスを始めている。
欧 州 の 機 械 翻 訳 プ ロ ジ ェ ク ト Euromatrix は、SMT

256

特許と RBMT のハイブリッド型オープンソース開発を行っ

欧州での特許の機械翻訳は日本やアジア諸国と比較した。これは欧州のような多言語間での対等な翻訳が要求てこれまで議論されていなかった。僅か 3 社の機械翻される場合に適切な手法であると述べている。ここか訳しかなかった。RBMT のものと SMT とが比較されら、機械翻訳だけでなくパーザや翻訳品質測定ツールが25th ANNIVERSARY

家に依存せざるを得ない高品質翻訳分野以外の領域で持Apertium というフリーなオープンソフト機械翻訳が続的に増大するであろう。

寄稿集提供されている。これらを利用してスペイン中心に、サービスされている。SMT、RBMT の成果からハイブ
翻訳品質がそれ程求められない領域として、目を通した生まれている。

り、データを得るために利用する科学技術ドキュメントは機械翻訳しかない。新たな分野として、外国語で書いスピーチている作品のドラフト翻訳、テレビのサブタイトルのリ

ここでは音声翻訳について簡単に記載している。

アルタイム翻訳、データベース情報の翻訳、Web ペー
ジや電子メールのオンライン翻訳等がある。

日本（ATR）、米国（CMU）、ドイツ（カールスルーエ大学）を拠点とした話者独立の音声翻訳プロジェクト

インターネットが機械翻訳の性格や応用を変化させるでが終了した。識者は、電話問合せ、銀行業務、コンピューあろう。Web ユーザが求めるものはどの言語であれ、タ入力等の非常に限定された用途では実用可能であると情報である。翻訳はその手段である。ユーザは言語間がしても、リアルタイムで話者独立な開放型音声翻訳に対シームレスにつながることを期待している。自動翻訳をして好意的に見ていないことを述べている。

介した情報検索、情報抽出、要約等である。これらは現在活発に研究開発が行われている。

言語対
ここでは、欧米の機械翻訳システムが対象とする言語対

このため、従来のような、後編集も含めた正確な翻訳でについて解説している。

はなく、言語的な特徴として会話的（非文を含む）な表現の翻訳が必要で、SMT はインターネット自身から言主要欧州言語とその他の欧州言語及びアラビア語、中国語データを供給できる唯一の道に思えると述べている。

語、日本語、韓国語等の相互翻訳である。
このレビューで記述した詳細情報は、以下の機械翻訳
EU では特に中欧、東欧の言語間の翻訳ツールのニーズ

アーカイブから見つけることが出来る。

が高い。また、マイノリティ及び移民の言語の研究も継http://www.mt-archive.info

続している。

米国政府の関心は、機械翻訳を利用した情報収集と解析にあり、中国語、アラビア語等の SMT に資金を提供している。

将来の MT
ここでは、機械翻訳の将来性について主としてサービス面から論じている。

大量のドキュメントの翻訳時間の短縮というコスト面でのメリットから機械翻訳は必須である。特に、プロ翻訳

YEAR BOOK 2O1O 257

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機械翻訳技術の向上

リッドや多重エンジン、組合せシステム等の設計手法が