Translation process
In interlingual machine translation systems, there are two monolingual components: the analysis of the source language and the interlingual, and the generation of the interlingua and the target language. It is however necessary to distinguish between interlingual systems using only syntactic methods (for example the systems developed in the 1970s at the universities of Grenoble and Texas) and those based on artificial intelligence (from 1987 in Japan and the research at the universities of Southern California and Carnegie Mellon). The following resources are necessary to an interlingual machine translation system:
Dictionaries (or lexicons) for analysis and generation (specific to the domain and the languages involved).
A conceptual lexicon (specific to the domain), which is the knowledge base about events and entities known in the domain.
A set of projection rules (specific to the domain and the languages).
Grammars for the analysis and generation of the languages involved.
One of the problems of knowledge-based machine translation systems is that it becomes impossible to create databases for domains larger than very specific areas. Another is that processing these databases is very computationally expensive.
Efficacy
One of the main advantages of
this strategy is that it provides an economical way to make
multilingual translation systems. With an interlingua it becomes
unnecessary to make a translation pair between each pair of languages
in the system. So instead of creating
language
pairs, where
is
the number of languages in the system, it is only necessary to make
pairs
between the
languages
and the interlingua.
The main disadvantage of this strategy is the difficulty of creating an adequate interlingua. It should be both abstract and independent of the source and target languages. The more languages added to the translation system, and the more different they are, the more potent the interlingua must be to express all possible translation directions. Another problem is that it is difficult to extract meaning from texts in the original languages to create the intermediate representation.
Google Translator Toolkit is a web application designed to allow translators to edit the translations that Google Translate automatically generates. With the Google Translator Toolkit, translators can organize their work and use shared translations, glossaries and translation memories. They can upload and translate Microsoft Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, and Wikipedia articles. Google Translator Toolkit is supported by Google Translate, a web-based translation service. Google Translator Toolkit can be configured to automatically pre-translate uploaded documents using Google Translate.
Google Translator Toolkit was released by Google Inc. on June 8, 2009. This product was expected to be named Google Translation Center, as had been announced in August 2008. However, the Google Translation Toolkit turned out to be a less ambitious product: "document rather than project-based, intended not as a process management package but simply another personal translation memory tool".
Google claims that Google Translator Toolkit is part of their "effort to make information universally accessible through translation" and "helps translators translate better and more quickly through one shared, innovative translation technology." Originally the Google Translator Toolkit was meant to attract collaboratively-minded people, the kind who translate Wikipedia entries or material for NGOs. However, nowadays it is more and more widely used in also commercial translation projects.
"The significance of the Google Translator Toolkit is its position as a fully online software-as-a-service (SaaS) that mainstreams some backend enterprise features and hitherto fringe innovations, presaging a radical change in how and by whom translation is performed."