Translation Tools: New Approaches to an Old Discipline: "Language translation software isn’t likely to allow you to lay off your bilingual staffers — at least not right away. But applied with discrimination and lots of preparation, translation tools can be fantastic productivity aids. And researchers say new approaches to this old discipline are greatly improving the performance of the tools."
"Ford Motor Co. began using “machine translation” software in 1998 and has so far translated 5 million automobile assembly instructions into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Mexican Spanish. Assembly manuals are updated in English every day, and their translations — some 5,000 pages a day — are beamed overnight to plants around the world. “It wouldn’t be feasible to do this all manually,” says Nestor Rychtyckyj, a technical specialist in artificial intelligence (AI) at Ford."
There seem to be three main types of translation tools: those that are based off of gramatical rules, those that are based off of statistical rules derived from previously translated text, and those that are based off of looking up previously translated sentences in a database. This last one is usually used in conjunction with one of the others.
ReplyDeleteBy setting up a glossary of terms used, there is software that can learn limited areas of knowledge for use in translation. This includes Fords use of translation the area of Automobiles.
ReplyDeleteBecause Ford is using a limited number of terms, they can maintain a glossary and then save the amount of translation they have to do by hand.