A few months before deploying its troops in Iraq, the
US government called on an army of translators to determine
whether the 12,000 page report provided by Saddam Hussein
satisfied the requirements of the UN disarmament experts.
Without the help of machine-assisted translation, this
work would have taken many more professionals. “The
situation in the world economy and the growth of the Web
have combined to produce an unprecedented obsession with
machine translation,” explains Simona Gandrabur,
a researcher in the Laboratory for Applied Research in
Computer Linguistics (RALI) at Université de Montréal.
The translation aids available today are much like built-in
spelling and grammatical software in microcomputers. Just
as a spell-checker shows us a typographical or spelling
error by underlining it, or a grammar checker proposes
a correct phrase, these automated aids display, in real
time on the user's screen, a series of one, two, four or
five words likely to constitute the best translation. The
user may accept the proposed phrase as is, change it or
simply ignore it.
The word sequences that seem most appropriate come from
texts in the program’s data bank. However, the percentage
of correct suggestions obtained from programs is still
low. The research at the RALI seeks to improve the quality
of these suggestions. This computer programmer and her
colleague George Foster at the same Laboratory have recently
managed to improve the performance of translation programs.
The limitations of machine translation, however, remain
very much in evidence. “We are making progress. But
we are still far from the day when whole books can be translated
automatically in as many languages as we want; that’s
almost a utopia,” laughs Simona Gandrabur.
Selected in a major international competition, Simona Gandrabur
and George Foster will be at the Center for Language and
Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
from June 30 to August 22 to lead a team evaluating “translation
aids,” interactive software packages that can assist
translation professionals.
Researcher: Simona Gandrabur
Telephone: (514) 343-7484
Email: gandrabu@iro.umontreal.ca
