02/2013

#6
Languages and translation

Machine
translation
Translation
 CONTENTS
ABOUT Machine translation
No rage against the machine 4
MT@Work Conference: by practitioners for practitioners 6
Evaluating Machine Translation: preliminary findings from the 1st DGT-wide translators’ survey 10
Technical Challenges for Machine Translation in the European Institutions 12
Working with Translators 14
The insatiable appetite for data 16

VOICES FROM OUTSIDE

Predicting Translation 18
Choose your own translation future 20
TAPTA4UN: machine translation collaboration between the United Nations and
the World Intellectual Property Organization 22

INTERVIEW
Machine translation: a tool to embrace and master 24

USEFUL INFORMATION
John Hutchins: the recognised historian of Machine Translation 26
Research in the field of Language Technologies 26
HIGHLIGHTS: — From the websites of some EU-funded MT research projects 26
— From websites of some other EU-funded research projects, initiatives and networks 27

Contributors
 E DITORIAL par Anabela Pereira,
rédactrice-en-chef

E
n septembre 2010, la Direction générale de la traduction (DGT) a
lancé le magazine thématique “Languages and translation”, in-
Languages and cluant des contributions d’auteurs extérieurs au microcosme
Translation de la fonction publique européenne. La présente édition
No 6 February 2013 sera la dernière de cette série et a pour thème la traduction au-
tomatique (TA). Le moment est venu de dresser le bilan de toute
l’expérience que la DGT a accumulée dans ce domaine.
Editor:
Anabela Pereira L’utilisation de systèmes de TA à la DGT remonte aux années
Graphic, layout and typesetter: 90. Les vagues d’élargissement successives se sont traduites
Philippe Marchetto par une nette augmentation du nombre de langues officielles
et donc du nombre de combinaisons linguistiques possibles.
Cette richesse linguistique, qui semblait avoir sonné le glas du
Published by the système à base de règles utilisé auparavant, place désormais
Directorate-General la DGT dans une situation privilégiée en ce qui concerne le dével-
for Translation oppement des nouveaux systèmes statistiques.
(Pinuccia Contino,
DGT.02 - Communication and En effet, une quantité considérable de données est produite quotidiennement à la DGT par un corps de
relations with stakeholders Unit)
traducteurs hautement qualifiés, dans les 23 langues officielles de l’Union européenne. Cette masse de
données alimente depuis 10 ans la base de données EURAMIS dans un format aisément exploitable par
les moteurs de TA, créant ainsi des conditions idéales pour le développement et le perfectionnement de
Printed by ces systèmes statistiques.
Office for Infrastructure
and Logistics, Brussels Notre Directeur général, M. Rytis Martikonis, a, dès son arrivée à la DGT, pleinement soutenu la TA,
conscient de sa valeur stratégique comme outil de valorisation de la diversité linguistique européenne.
Des moyens importants ont été investis par l’UE pour développer les applications complexes qui sous-
Download this magazine from tendent ces systèmes. En 2010, la DGT lançait le projet MT@EC visant le développement d’un système
EUROPA (the EU’s website): de TA statistique basé sur la plateforme logicielle libre Moses. Fin décembre 2012, la DGT organisait la
ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/
première d’une série de conférences dédiées à la TA afin de réunir toutes les parties concernées et de
publications/magazines
tirer des conclusions utiles pour l’avenir.

Le projet est porté par une équipe compétente et motivée, soutenue par de très nombreux traducteurs
Address editorial enthousiastes qui apportent une contribution déterminante. Nous avons recueilli les témoignages d’un
correspondence to: certain nombre de ces collègues, grâce auxquels vous pourrez vous faire une idée assez précise de l’état
Communication and relations d’avancement de ce projet à la DGT et des conclusions de la conférence. Le présent numéro comprend
with stakeholders Unit également des contributions d’acteurs extérieurs au service, qui donnent une image plus globale des
Directorate-General for
Translation
développements en matière de TA.
European Commission
rue de Genève, 6
Les traducteurs n’ont cependant aucun souci à se faire: les systèmes de TA ne sont qu’un outil parmi
Office G-6 6/16, d’autres, qui leur est proposé pour leur faciliter la tâche et non pas pour les remplacer! Aucune machine
B-1140 Brussels ne pourra jamais faire preuve du même discernement qu’un être humain dans le choix des meilleures
Belgium solutions de traduction! 

Neither the European Commission

nor any person acting on its behalf
is responsible for any use which
might be made of the information
contained in Languages and
translation. This is not an official
publication and neither the
Commission nor any of its services
are bound in any way by its
contents.
01/2013 #6 3
 A BOUT Machine translation

No rage against the machine

by Josep Bonet, Head of the Informatics Unit in DGT

Machine translation, or MT for

short, has a history in DGT. Even
in the early 90s an MT system
based on rules was in use by some
translators. At the time, a limited
number of languages were covered,
with varying degrees of quality. As
the story goes, the French, English
or German translators abhorred it,
while the Spanish or the Portuguese
rather liked it. Indeed, around 1995
I was working in a unit where all
incoming documents, provided
they were in French or English
— i.e. almost all of them — were
systematically pre-translated by the
clerical assistants using the ECMT
system in place at the time, and
almost everybody used the output
on all occasions.

H
owever, MT received a bad
blow around the time of the
big bang that shook the EU.
The rule-based system had
been enlarged from covering two
languages to covering ten. And this
at a moment when the EU had eleven
official languages! Quite significant
‘To get a language pair
up to a sufficient level of
quality required years
of effort and substantial
injections of money.’
financial resources were devoted to
MT, at a time when cost control was
coming to the fore. To get a language
pair up to a sufficient level of quality
required years of effort and substan-
tial injections of money. But, worst of
all, with nine new languages being
added in one go, and three more to
be added less than three years after,
improving the system was mission
impossible. Resources would never
be made available to turn MT into a
technology for all.
The MT winter came — not quite like
the nuclear one, but cold neverthe-
less. MT lost steam. It was consid-
ered a non-democratic technology,
compared to translation memories.
Indeed, not only did translation
memory technology require less in-
vestment, it also yielded the same
results for all languages, be they
Romance, Slavic or Finno-Ugric. So
DGT stopped investing in MT, except
where Language Departments were
ready to use their own translators
to improve or correct dictionaries.
The prospect was quite bleak. A
system based on rules needs con-
stant fine-tuning of those rules, but
especially updating of glossaries.
It was clear that after a few years,
the system would reach a point of
degradation which would render it
useless even for the ‘good’ pairs.
Eventually it was an external factor,
a judgment by the General Court of
the EU, which forced the system to

4 01/2013 #6
A BOUT
be discontinued. That was the end
of it. RIP.
Translation memories, on the oth-
er hand, while being a wonder-
ful breakthrough of the 90s which
had made it possible to reuse past
translations, thus guaranteeing
higher productivity and much higher
terminological and phraseological
consistency, were not the ultimate
solution either. With very repeti-
tive text, with files produced using
strong input from past documents,
they could yield astonishing results.
But in the European Commission,
which has the right of initiative,
i.e. deals with many new subjects,
match rates of 30% are reckoned to
be rather good for standard docu-
ments. Translators knew that much
more wisdom was buried in the
huge memories that DGT held in the
European Commission’s Data Cen-
tre. A simple function like concord-
ance yielded good results, and in
context, answered almost 100% of
queries. Many phrases were buried
in thousands of sentences, but were
not being retrieved with memory
technology because the remainder
of the sentence was completely dif-
ferent. It was clear to many that bil-
lions of bilingual parallel sentences,
such as DGT kept in its digital vaults,
could and should be squeezed to ex-
tract all the knowledge contained in
them.
The answer was at the other side of
town — a small town called Luxem-
bourg. A succession of EU Research
Framework Programmes had been
funding research projects on MT for
many years. One of them produced
Moses, the world’s most heavily
used open-source system, to create
MT pairs with statistical methods
by crunching millions of sentences,
preferably parallel text. MT was at
the fingertips of anyone with a PC …
and lots of data. And, curiously, no
linguistic knowledge was needed, at
least to start with. Believe it or not,
01/2013 #6
all the machine does is analyse par-
allel text to identify the frequency
at which, when a word A is found
in the source language, a word B is
found in the target one. The higher
the frequency, the more probable it
‘MT was useful,
because in the
meantime the world
had gone more global
than ever and people
were happy to accept
an inferior-quality
translation rather
than no translation
at all.’
is that we’ve found the good trans-
lation. Over and above this, the ma-
chine computes the probabilities
that groups of 2 to 7 or 8 words ap-
pear in a certain order. The rest is
simple. With the first probabilities, it
translates all words. With the sec-
ond ones, it reassembles the words
and creates sentences. The result
sometimes is not very good. But
many other times it is a perfectly
idiomatic expression!
Around the same time, a quiet revo-
lution was in the making out there. A
well-known company built around a
popular search engine had been of-
fering MT for a while, based on the
same rule-based technology that
DGT had used in the previous cen-
tury. And it then decided to offer all
internet surfers free statistical MT
produced with all the corpora they
could obtain by crawling the web.
Machine translation
The uptake was quite rapid in the
beginning and extremely fast soon
after. Suddenly, MT was not a laugh-
able technology, known for the funny
mistranslations — for instance, ‘the
spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’
translated as ‘the vodka is good, but
the meat is rotten’. MT was useful,
because in the meantime the world
had gone more global than ever and
people were happy to accept an in-
ferior-quality translation rather than
no translation at all.
It is in this context that DGT decided
in 2010 to develop an entirely new
data-driven MT system which would
cover all languages in pairs with at
least one of the procedural languag-
es. The aim was to better serve our
customers in two ways: by providing
them with a self-service system of-
fering raw translations, and by im-
proving the efficiency of translators
who, by using MT output as one of
the language tools at their disposal,
could produce more text with even
better consistency. It was further felt
that, given the restricted nature of
many texts translated in the Europe-
an Commission, be it by translators
or by any other user, it was important
to use a system running on the Com-
mission’s premises.
The rest is pure engineering. Very
soon 42 language pairs had been
created and tested. Ten language
departments were satisfied with the
resultant quality levels and were
included in a scheme automati-
cally producing MT for all incoming
requests to be translated into their
respective languages. That number
has now risen to 17 languages. Ver-
sion 2 of the language pairs, which
now stood at 52, was produced and
declared good. And a system to ca-
ter for the anticipated big demand
was developed. The system will
become fully operational on 1 July
2013. This day will mark the end of
winter. 
5
 A BOUT Machine translation

MT@Work Conference: by practitioners for practitioners

by Piet Verleysen, Machine Translation System Owner, with input from Daniel Kluvanec, Machine Translation Business
Manager, Paula Simpson, Policy Officer, and Hilário Leal Fontes, senior translator

DGT has been using and developing machine translation (MT) for many
years now. The time has now come to capitalise on all this experience. On
30 November 2012, DGT organised a conference in Luxembourg on ‘MT@
work’, the first of its kind. It took the form of a trialogue between partners
from three different worlds of professional translation, all of them with
their own particular technology solutions for machine translation as a part
of their workflow: the Directorate General for Translation of the European
Commission, the Documentation Division of the United Nations, and TAUS
(the Translation Automation User Society). The aim of the conference was to
share knowledge between professionals on the impact of MT for professional
translation in the EU institutions, and to take a further step in the direction
of better tools and better integration.

P
articipants, predominantly
from translation services of
all the EU institutions, pro-
duced a day which crackled
with ideas and which helped to make
the overall picture clear. Where do we
stand on using state-of-the-art tech-
nologies in legislative drafting and
institutional translation? What are
our aims as we take this profession all” approach possible, at least not
forward? for the moment.

There should be NO FEAR, at least for

‘The conference took A real CHALLENGE: with technology the coming generations of profes-
evolving ever faster, how do we keep
the form of a trialogue track of it and how does it impact our
sional translators, of anyone being
“replaced” by a computer.
between partners working processes? We are continu-
ally being asked to create more and
from three different more added value with fewer and
It’s all about BIG DATA, so we have
every interest in sharing our data
worlds of professional fewer resources. So the important with trusted partners and in boosting
thing is not to work harder, but to
translation, all of work smarter. Where does transla-
interinstitutional (EU) and interna-
tional (UN) collaboration. This should
them with their own tion stand in terms of industrial revo- be an easy thing to organise, and we
lution history?
particular technology will all benefit from it immediately.

solutions for machine
translation as a part of
their workflow.’
MT is ‘only’ a TOOL, just another tool
— how powerful it is depends upon
the way we use it. MT quality varies
enormously from one language to
another. There is no “one-size-fits-
Big data thrusts the QUALITY of our
central memories into the limelight.
Do we need to get a tighter grip on
our “linguistic resources manage-
ment”?

6 01/2013 #6
 A BOUT
What do we need to MEASURE (bet-
ter) in order to master our profes-
sion? Measuring quality is problem-
atic. Benchmarking is key. Human
vs. automatic evaluation needs to
be considered, but more work needs
to be done here (see TAUS Dynamic
Quality Evaluation Framework).
Is it not all about CHANGE manage-
ment? Don’t push — if the tool is OK
it will sell itself. Experiment, don’t be
afraid to fail, celebrate success! Take
account of the staff learning curve.
The conference featured three
workshops: Machine Translation
Strengths and Flaws, chaired by
Daniel Kluvanec (Machine Transla-
tion Business Manager), Manage-
ment Considerations, chaired by
Viorel Florean (Head of Romanian
Translation unit) and Translators’
Considerations, chaired by Cristina
De Preter (Head of the Portuguese
Language Department). The main
conclusions of each of these work-
shops are presented below.
Machine Translation Strengths
and Flaws
The discussion was led and steered
by a linguistically well balanced
Director General Rytis Martikonis chairing the MT@work conference, the first of its kind, 30th November 2012.
01/2013 #6
panel composed of representatives
of all EU institutions involved in MT
development or testing. During the
course of the year, in addition to MT
use by DGT, test machine translation
samples had also been prepared for
most of the other EU institutions.
The purpose of the workshop was to
assess the results, and thus gain a
comprehensive picture of the perfor-
mance and quality of the pre‑release
system MT@EC. It also sought to
identify specific areas for coopera-
tion, as well as possible synergies at
interinstitutional level.
There was a general consensus —
not only from DGT but also from the
other institutions — that the mor-
phological richness of languages
(i.e. on a scale ranging from analyti-
cal, moderately inflected, highly in-
flected to agglutinated) and the dif-
ferences in syntax of languages
have a direct impact on the quality
of MT output. Certain language pairs
work better than others, something
which is then reflected in the different
levels of satisfaction amongst us-
ers: some (predominantly analytical
target languages) are very enthusi-
astic, whereas others (predominantly
heavily inflected target languages)
Machine translation
are much less keen or not at all (pre-
dominantly agglutinative target lan-
guages or languages extensively us-
ing composita).
The same pattern emerges from the
recent DGT customer satisfaction
survey, which also points to a grow-
ing number of users. The number
‘The morphological
richness of languages
and the differences in
syntax of languages have
a direct impact on the
quality of MT output.’
of ‘faithful’ users is rising too. The
fact that this year’s user conference
was brought forward from its intend-
ed 2013 date is a further indicator of
that growth in enthusiasm. Voluntary
uptake of MT in a translator’s toolbox
clearly indicates its added value for
the professional translator — at least
for some languages and some texts
in some contexts.
Subject matter of the texts to be
translated often impacts on the qual-
ity of MT. A reasonable rule of thumb
is simply a yes/no as to whether sim-
ilar ideas (at the sub-sentence level)
have already been processed in the
past, which means they were present
in the human translation corpus. A
further factor is their frequency in
corpora.
In many cases, once translators have
overcome their initial reticence they
are pleasantly surprised by the sys-
tem, and start to rely on it as an aid
— i.e. for typographical support, as a
source of lexical inspiration and for
gisting purposes. However, it is im-
7
 A BOUT
portant, before any prejudice sets
in, to try using MT systematically
for at least two weeks in order to
get used to its strengths and flaws.
Nevertheless, it is not very clear yet
whether the skills translators need
to work efficiently with MT are or are
not transferable.
On the other hand, there still seems
to be a sizeable editing distance
between machine and human trans-
lation for a text of publication qual-
ity — even to the point of editing
being so costly that it may be better
to translate from scratch. Speedier
translation, though, might require
more thorough revision. Computa-
tional linguistics apparently still has
a long way to go, at least for highly
inflected or agglutinated languages.
The general impression remains that
there are many questions that tech-
nology has either not yet answered
or not even addressed. This is partly
due to an apparent lack of syntacti-
cal or morphological processing, with
chronic insufficiencies appearing over
and over again — word order taken
over mechanically from the Eng-
lish original; inflectional morphemes
mismatched; open compounds or
composita not properly recognised;
terminology used inconsistently, ne-
gation applied unreliably, etc. In ad-
dition, though, it would be good if
computational linguists could
tackle more subtle semantic prob-
lems which they could take over
‘The attitude of the
manager is a key
factor here. Leading by
example, paired with
gentle persuasion — as
opposed to coercion —
can go a long way.’
8 01/2013 #6
The MT@work conference brought people from the translation services of the EU institutions together
to discuss the challenges related to machine translation.
from other subfields of linguistics
(like semantics or pragmatics).
Management Considerations
In the course of a lively debate, the
participants grappled with various
key aspects of the impact of using
machine translation, focusing pri-
marily on the manager’s viewpoint.
Although MT holds undisputed po-
tential value, the full picture in terms
of benefits and drawbacks has yet to
be clearly defined.
As far as workload and work alloca-
tion are concerned, managers should
ideally be able to measure the
quality of the MT output (as is the
case with Euramis, where the ‘match’
is gauged as a percentage). In other
words, it would be useful to have
access to a metric that is as closely
aligned as possible to human appre-
ciation of text quality.
In terms of staff motivation, MT can
be a double-edged sword. On the
one hand, editing work linked to the
use of MT can sometimes be cum-
bersome, and this may not be every
Machine translation
translator’s dream, leading to a loss
of motivation. On the other, the use
of MT could have a liberating effect:
translators otherwise wrapped up in
the humdrum of translating repeti-
tive, often tedious documents, could
devote more time to translating
more interesting and intellectually
challenging texts.
The attitude of the manager is a
key factor here. Leading by exam-
ple, paired with gentle persuasion —
as opposed to coercion — can go a
long way. If translators give MT a try
and find it useful they will naturally
want to use it.
Another determinant factor is the
quality of central memories. ‘Cor-
rupting or contaminating’ Euramis
with poor quality data would have a
seriously negative impact, not only
compromising quality output, but
also having a deterrent effect on us-
ers, i.e. by undermining translators’
trust. Consequently it is crucial, be-
fore sending post-edited MT transla-
tion to the central memory, to assess
whether the data are fit to be re-
used. This problem could be circum-
 A BOUT
vented by having a separate data-
base for texts of ‘less-than-human’
translation quality.
The potential impact of MT on the
freelance market was also men-
tioned. There was felt to be a need
to review and address questions like
pricing, type of documents to be out-
sourced, appropriate level of post-
editing, etc.
Extending the use of MT — within the
Commission and to Member States
or citizens — and the consequences
of this extended use likewise called
for careful investigation, in terms of
financial gains and organisational
benefits.
Translators’ Considerations
This workshop generated a lively de-
bate about translators’ feelings to-
wards, and acceptance/rejection of,
MT, its uneven performance levels,
and its advantages and disadvan-
tages in our working environment.
Translators from the DGT, the Euro-
pean Parliament and one panellist
from the Court of Justice voiced their
opinions.
The general perception was that
current MT in DGT is very good for
some languages, some texts and
some translators. In other words, MT
quality varies greatly with language
combinations and types of text,
and its use varies with the perceived
Daniel Kluvanec, the organizer of MT@work conference.
01/2013 #6
quality and the translators’ working
methods.
Feedback from translators in the
workshop regarding the perceived
quality of MT varied from excel-
lent (e.g. for EN-SV in some SANCO
texts and good to very good results
in general for romance languages)
to useless for ET or HU (EN-HU MT
was humorously evoked as a kind of
“drunken” Hungarian). This is much in
line with the findings of DGT surveys
and evaluations and confirms that
MT from English into agglutina-
tive languages is the most chal-
lenging issue for our current SMT
technology. The Baltic languages
seem to fare somewhat better,
though the quality level is still low,
with many grammar and word order
issues. This is also in line with the
findings. The fact is that, whatever
the language family and perceived
level of quality for translation, gram-
mar in general and morphology in
particular seem to be a shared prob-
lem.
Quality also varies with text types
and/or the good/bad quality of the
original. At the one extreme, well
written and formulaic texts seem to
be where MT performs best across all
language combinations. At the other
extreme, sloppy originals featuring
new phrases are the ones where MT
provides the least, if any, help to the
translator.
MT can help translators with the
whole sentence (with some major
or minor changes), with scattered
phrases or with terminology and vo-
cabulary, or may, in some cases, be
useful just for inspiration. But all this
is closely tied in with the transla-
tor’s expectations, subject-mat-
ter and source language knowl-
edge and/or working methods. Low
expectations and a positive attitude
towards MT seem to have played an
important role in machine translation
uptake in the Maltese and Polish lan-
Machine translation
guage departments. The point was
made that, even when perceived as
good or very good, MT does not al-
ways save translators’ time. The time
saved in typing is invested in more
thorough checking and research-
ing, resulting in a sounder text than
would otherwise be the case, but not
in a speedier translation.
The use of MT in professional trans-
lation at DGT is also generating
fears among translators. Fear of
being deprived of the choice of tools
for each job and of becoming just
‘Low expectations and a
positive attitude towards
MT seem to have played
an important role in
machine translation
uptake.’
a part of an assembly line. Fear of
having to make up for the MT perfor-
mance deficit in poorer-quality com-
binations. Fear of no longer being al-
lowed to use one’s creativity. Finally,
fear that MT will change the transla-
tion profession so much that it turns
into something else entirely.
There is also the fear that the devel-
opment of more difficult language
combinations might be left behind or
even abandoned because of an un-
competitive resources-to-language-
size ratio, leaving the translators who
work out of and into those languages,
and the very languages themselves
and their speakers, at a disadvan-
tage. In this respect, it was pointed
out that cooperation with entities ac-
tive in the MT field in the countries
where these languages are spoken
could be mutually beneficial. 
9
 A BOUT Machine translation

Evaluating Machine Translation:

preliminary findings from the first DGT-wide translators’ survey
by Hilário Leal Fontes1, Chair of the Evaluation Methodology Task Force of DGT’s Machine Translation User Group (MTUG)

In setting out to measure, evaluate and manage Machine Translation

(MT), DGT’s strategy is based on four components: usage statistics,
human evaluation, automatic evaluation and regular surveys. The first
three of these have already been used for specific tasks and/or aspects and
are not discussed here.

T
he first DGT-wide survey of
the MT service offered to its
translators was organised
by the MTUG and ran during
November 2012, about one year and
a half after DGT started to offer MT
from and into English and a few oth-
er historical language combinations
featuring French (52 language pairs
in all).
Some Language Departments (e.g.
Portuguese and Spanish) had been
using rule-based MT fairly extensive-
ly up to end of 2010, and the Por-
tuguese Department had been using
its own home-brewed Moses engines
between 2010 and the first half of
2011. However, for most Language
Departments, using MT was a novel
experience.
‘Translators’ views
are important
to gauge their
perceptions of
the usefulness of
current MT for their
translation work.’
A first snapshot
The introduction to the survey point-
ed out that translators’ views were
important: to gauge their percep-
tions of the usefulness of current MT
for their translation work and, more
specifically, to draw as complete an
overview as possible about:
• how much use translators make of
each MT language pair;
• how highly each MT language pair
is rated for translation work;
options for each question), but with
• why people currently use MT or an
plenty of free-texts boxes so that re-
MT language pair;
spondents could make their opinions
• why people do not currently use known.
MT or an MT language pair;
• important shortcomings that The response rate was very encour-
prevent people from using an MT aging: 763 translators — about half
language pair in its current state. of DGT’s translation population — re-
plied. It was also encouraging to see
that 535 respondents had used MT in
The survey their translation work over the previ-
ous six months. Of the others, 87 had
The survey was published online; all
DGT staff were encouraged to reply,
tried but not used MT, and 141 had
and responses were anonymous and
never tried to use MT in their transla-
tion work.
voluntary. In preparing the survey,
the Task Force built on the experi-
ence from previous partial surveys, How much?
and the fine details were discussed
with colleagues from DGT’s Statistics Translators were asked how often
they had used MT for a given lan-
Unit.
guage pair over the past six months.
Technically, the survey was designed Each respondent could rate up to five
for quick completion, with many mul- language pairs that they had used
tiple-choice questions (up to three (535 responses yielded 643 ratings).

10 01/2013 #6
A BOUT Machine translation
The largest groups comprised trans- ings) and for 25‑50 % (87 ratings) of Why not use MT?
lators who said they had used MT for their translation jobs.
more than 75  % (200 ratings) and For people who said they had never
for up to 25 % (273 ratings) of their The following table shows the dif- used MT, the five most quoted rea-
translation jobs. Well behind, in third ferent translation engines grouped sons, in descending order, were:
and fourth places, came those who in five clusters according to the pre- • need to know more about MT
had used MT for 50‑75 % (83 rat- dominant uptake pattern: before using (58 times);
• MT quality is too poor (52 times);
Only users Only users Majority of users Majority of users Majority of users
with less than with max. with usage rate of with usage rate with usage rate • MT could induce insidious mistakes
25% usage 50% usage 50% or LESS around 50% of 50% or MORE
(37 times);
EN-CS, EN-DA, EN-ET, EN-EL, EN-FR, EN-BG, EN-ES,
EN->XX EN-DE EN-LT EN-FI, EN-LV, EN-NL, EN-IT, EN-MT, EN-PT, EN-RO, • I can type and translate quickly
EN-PL, EN-SK EN-SL EN-SV (20 times);
FR->XX FR-IT FR-ES, FR-PT
BG-EN, • MT dumbs down the language and
FR-EN
XX->EN DE-EN CS-EN, IT-EN, EL-EN, ES-EN PT-EN can give rise to suboptimal work
PL-EN (20).
Note: Only language combinations with five or more ratings were considered.
For those who had tried MT but had
How good? 2 — Many words or partial phrases not used it in their daily work over
reusable with acceptable editing the past six months, the five most
Translators were also asked to rate — 368 ratings quoted reasons, in descending order,
the different engines they had tried 1 — Some words or partial phrases were:
or used on a 0-4 scale; the results making me aware of alternatives • too many changes needed (40
were (some translators rated more — 118 ratings times);
than one language pair; 622 re-
0 — Translating from scratch • MT quality was too poor (38
sponses yielded 726 ratings):
outperforms any other benefit times);
4 — Most segments reusable, similar — 55 ratings, mostly from
• MT disrupted working methods
to good translation memory translators who had tried MT but
(21 times);
matches — 92 ratings decided not to use it
• MT was not a time-saver
3 — Most segments reusable, similar The following table sets out the dif- as terminology still needed
to poor translation memory ferent engines in three broad clus- rechecking (16 times);
matches — 93 ratings ters:
• MT induces mistakes they would
Majority of 0, 1 and 2 Around 2 Majority of 2, 3 and 4 not otherwise have made (12
EN-BG, EN-CS, EN-FR, EN-LV, EN-DA, EN-EL, EN-ES, EN-IT,
times)
EN->XX EN-DE, EN-ET, EN-FI, EN-LT
EN-NL, EN-PL, EN-SK, EN-SL EN-MT, EN-PT, EN-RO, EN-SV
FR->XX FR-ES, FR-IT, FR-PT
XX->EN BG-EN, DE-EN, IT-EN
FR-EN
CS-EN, EL-EN ES-EN, PL-EN, PT-EN
Shortcomings
Note: Only language combinations with five or more ratings were considered. In terms of important shortcomings
that prevent the use of current MT,
Why use MT? in translation memories (274 grammar/morphological rules of the
times); target language seems to be the
For people who said they had used
• start with a quick draft and most annoying factor (mentioned
MT over the past six months, the five
improve it (190 times); 204 times), followed by distortion
most quoted reasons, in descending
of meaning (173 times), source-
order, were: • helps cope with heavy workloads language word order reproduced
• MT is a typing aid (283 times); (169 times); in the target language (140 times)
• MT is a source of inspiration for • gains time for more thorough and terminological inconsistency (70
alternative translations available research (145 times). times). 

1 Hilário Fontes Leal is a senior translator that has been involved in the development and dissemination of MT within DGT’s Portuguese
Department since 1999. He is also a member of DGT’s Machine Translation User Group.

01/2013 #6 11
 A BOUT Machine translation

Technical Challenges for Machine Translation

in the European Institutions
by Andreas Eisele1, MT Project manager

After a long and interesting history, where phases of enthusiasm and

exaggerated hopes alternated with deep disappointment and bitter
frustration, the old dream of machine translation (MT) has finally become
a reality. Today, anyone browsing the Web can have a page translated
from an unfamiliar foreign language into something that should — at
least in principle — be basically understandable.

A
lthough the idea can be
traced back to the 17th
century and patents and
prototypes of mechanical
translation devices were invented as
far back as the early 1930s, the big
leap forward came about thanks to
powerful computers and recent sta-
tistical techniques, which are able to
extract the relevant knowledge from
existing translations without any
need for human experts to build and
maintain complex systems of rules.
However, typical MT results quickly
reveal that the problem of machine
translation is far from being solved,
and there is a huge space for further
improvement in translation quality.
When targeting morphologically rich
and complex languages, the trans-
lations can be peppered with wrong
endings and ill-formed constructions,
and making sense of the MT result
can be a challenge in itself.

Hence, for many important applica-

‘The big leap forward
came about thanks to
powerful computers
and recent statistical
techniques, which are
able to extract the
relevant knowledge from
existing translations
without any need for
human experts to build
and maintain complex
systems of rules.’
tions, sufficient quality will only be
achieved when the simple statisti-
cal methods underlying the current
mainstream technology are com-
bined with linguistically augmented
models of morphology and grammar.
In the long run, only such «hybrid»
approaches to MT will be able to do
justice to the complexity and rich-
ness of our European languages.
The MT@EC project aims at making
state-of-the-art technology from on-
going research available to transla-
tors and administrators in European
institutions. We will mainly serve
three types of users:
• Administrators who need to
skim a document in a foreign
language to understand what
it is about: As distribution of
such documents is often restricted,
using a free MT service is not
appropriate and our colleagues
are strongly advised against it.
• Translators who support the
dissemination of documents
in all official EU languages:
They need an MT system that is
aware of the correct terminology
for any given context, and this
system needs to be integrated
into the suite of tools used by the
translation departments.
• Users of on-line services that
connect administrations in

12 01/2013 #6
A BOUT
all EU countries: Such services
need to support all EU languages
and have to allow users in one
country to enter information in
their own language and make this
information accessible to users in
another country.
These three types of applications
lead to quite a number of interest-
ing requirements, which our project is
trying to address at the same time.
In order to be useful in many circum-
stances, the translation engines need
to cover a broad set of languages,
including very complex ones, as well
as many document types and subject
domains. A big challenge here is to
find and manage suitable training
data from which the relevant lexical
material can be extracted.
It should furthermore be possible to
build MT engines for specific applica-
tion domains where certain terminol-
ogy needs to be used. The adaptation
to such specific domains needs to be
based on suitable samples of trans-
lated documents, without expensive
manual intervention.
Obviously, the linguistic quality of
our system needs to be further en-
hanced, especially for target lan-
guages with flexible word order and
rich morphology. A number of useful
techniques have been developed in
recent or ongoing research in com-
putational linguistics, and our aim is
to integrate these methods into the
algorithms used by MT@EC, as soon
as their value in our context can be
established.
Possible candidates for such enhance-
ments include syntactic analysis of
the source text (quite a challenge in
1 Andreas Eisele is a computational linguist who has been working on natural language processing and MT since his studies in computer
science in 1983. Before joining the DGT, he was senior researcher at the DFKI (Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz)
and Saarland University where he has been in charge of the EU projects Euromatrix and EuromatrixPlus that provided funding for the
development of Moses and statistical and hybrid machine translation between all European Languages. Since October 2010 he is leading
the team that builds the MT engines within the MT@EC project at DGT.
01/2013 #6
itself), reordering of the constituents
to match up with the preferred word
order in the target language, as well
as morphologic analysis and gener-
ating inflected forms with the correct
linguistic features, such as number,
gender, and case. Incorporating such
improvements into our MT engines
requires us to do a certain amount
of research and in-house develop-
ment to find out whether and how
the methods that were successful
in research experiments can be used
without making our system less ro-
bust or slower.
There are also some interesting en-
gineering challenges we need to ad-
dress. Current statistical translation
methods need to explore a large
space (think millions!) of configura-
tions for a single sentence before
deciding which possible result would
score best according to the statisti-
cal models. Even on our modern and
very fast computers, this computa-
tion may take several seconds per
sentence, and hence the translation
of a long document may need to be
distributed over multiple servers to
reduce waiting times for users. We
also need to develop techniques to
reconcile the need to deliver trans-
lations of small snippets of text as
quickly as possible while simulta-
neously processing batches of long
documents.
Last, but not least, one of the most
important applications of MT@EC
is to give translators in the Euro-
pean institutions another useful tool
that will complement the transla-
tion memory technology provided by
Euramis. This requires a seamless
integration of MT into the comput-
er-aided translation tools. As Prof.
Philipp Koehn describes in his con-
Machine translation
tribution to this volume, several on-
going research projects are trying
to find out what shape this might
take in the future, and collabora-
tion between our project and these
researchers should be beneficial for
both sides. Ideally, a well-integrated
solution would allow the translator to
improve the result of MT and these
improvements would impact not only
the current document, but would im-
mediately flow back into the MT sys-
‘ One of the most
important applications
of MT@EC is to give
translators in the
European institutions
another useful tool that
will complement the
translation memory
technology provided by
Euramis.’
tem so that it can learn from its us-
ers and improve automatically. Once
such an automatic feed-back cycle is
implemented, the fact that the sys-
tem will be used by thousands of
highly skilled linguistic experts for all
the official EU languages on a daily
basis would open up quite unique
possibilities for our project. Perhaps
then the old dream of overcoming
the language barriers with the help
of machines will finally come true. 
13
 A BOUT Machine translation

Working with Translators

by Markus Foti1, DGT’s MT Quality Manager

If you have the right ingredients available - computing power, machine

translation software, and, especially, loads and loads of data - setting up
a bare-bones machine translation system is not overwhelmingly difficult.
Given enough data to feed into the open-source (so freely available and
free-of-cost) MOSES machine translation engine, you can have a basic
system up and running quite quickly.

T
hat’s one thing we are not
short of at DGT, data. Euramis
has been growing for close
to 10 years now, and even
though it wasn’t originally intended
for building MT engines, it stores our
translations in an ideal format for
that.
When the MT@EC project was
launched, volunteers from each lan-
guage department were asked to
come forward to set up a Machine
Translation User Group (MTUG) which
meets to discuss the direction of the
project and pass information to and
from translators.

The devil is in the details. Data alone
doesn’t mean the output is going to
be very good. We need to work with
people to point out the problems and
refine the systems. And highly-skilled
people is another thing DGT has in
abundance!
‘The devil is in the
details. Data alone
doesn’t mean the output
is going to be very good.
We need to work with
people to point out the
problems and refine the
systems.’
After the first “baseline engines” were
created, through the MTUG, transla-
tors from the language departments
working out of English were asked
to assess them. 10 departments felt
the output in their languages was
already good enough to be used, but
that left 12 where a lot of work nee-
ded to be done. And we are not naïve
enough to claim that “good enough”
means there is no room for impro-
vement!
It’s no secret that the state of the
technology is such that you can-
not expect perfect translations in
terms of grammar, terminology or
even readability. Work on improving
these is on-going, and for specifics
we look to those who speak the lan-
guages. But to start, there are also
simpler problems that can be tackled
more directly. For example, transla-
tors were expressing their frustra-
tion with having to regularly correct
things such as excess spaces, wrong
quotation marks (“ ” should be « » in
French and „ “ in German), corrupted
characters, even, in the cases of Por-
tuguese and Maltese, old spellings
mixed with new official forms.
Such problems may not be transla-
tion, strictly speaking, but they have
a serious impact on how good the
translations are judged to be. So we
asked the language departments to
identify such problems and have in-
corporated 35 changes in the pre or
post-processing to deliver cleaner
machine translations. These fixes
should be included in the 3rd gen-
eration of engines, which are cur-
rently being built. We hope that the
improvement will be immediately
apparent!

14 01/2013 #6
A BOUT
The rise of machine translation as
a translation aid also means that
working methods will evolve, and we
want to hear about how translators
are changing their day-to-day work-
ing methods. Post-editing is what
comes to mind, but that overlooks
Euramis and translation memories,
which have in no way been super-
seded. To try to find out the different
ways in which translators are using
MT, best practice workshops were
held in autumn 2012 . Approaches
varied from the standard of using
MT within Translator’s Workbench, to
keeping a print-out of the full ma-
chine translated version on the side
to help with difficult bits while keep-
ing easier passages free of MT influ-
ence.
The biggest change, though, was not
in techniques so much as in mindset
- the suggestion that MT be used a
source of ideas, rather than as a text
to be corrected.
Work on improving the engines
doesn’t stop there. Many of our lan-
On-line MT evaluation tool asking which Finnish rendering is better.
1 After 13 years in translation, Markus Foti is currently the MT Quality Officer for DGT. He is responsible for working with translators to get
feedback on MT and working with other EU institutions to test and share progress in MT.
01/2013 #6
guages have complex grammatical
structures which need additional ef-
forts.
Most recently we have been working
on Finnish, one of the most challeng-
ing languages for statistical machine
translation to deal with because of
its heavy agglutination. Two sepa-
rate approaches were taken to im-
prove translation from English into
Finnish: some grammatical analysis,
and stemming vocabulary and add-
ing endings through post-processing.
In the opposite direction, some part-
of-speech knowledge was applied.
Automatic metrics indicated a slight
improvement in all three cases, but
these experiments needed to be
assessed by people. The MT team
doesn’t speak all of the EU languag-
es, so Finnish and English translators
were asked to assess the results (two
improvements, and one regression, if
you’re curious), using an online tool
that had previously been used to test
the 2nd generation of engines.
Machine translation
‘If MT@EC becomes a
standard tool to help
DGT handle its steadily
increasing workload
and a reliable source
for the EU and national
institutions, we will have
achieved our goal.’
As we move towards the official
target date for release of MT@EC,
we will be looking to translators to
gauge how the translations provided
by the system are progressing in
more detailed ways – a post-editing
tool (called PET) is being tested as a
way of measuring how many chang-
es translators make in terms of key-
strokes, time and “editing distance”.
The data it records is very helpful,
but using the tool in our environment
is not as user-friendly as we would
like.
Indeed, the final goal is simply for
translators to continue working as
usual, while the MT team compares
the final translations to what the MT
system generated and aims to get
this difference to be as small as pos-
sible. That is never likely to be zero,
but if MT@EC becomes a standard
tool to help DGT handle its steadily
increasing workload and a reliable
source for the EU and national in-
stitutions, we will have achieved our
goal. Without the assistance and ex-
pertise offered by DGT’s translators,
this could never succeed! 
15
 A BOUT Machine translation

The insatiable appetite for data

by Szymon Klocek1, Machine Translation data administrator

As the old joke goes, the prerequisite for working in IT is to be lazy. This
should not be misconstrued as actual sloth: what this saying means is
that informatics should be about minimizing human effort and making
the machines do the heavy lifting instead. Employing computers means
trying to automate things as much as possible and this holds true for
Machine Translation.

T
here are basically two types
of Machine Translation sys-
tems: rule-based and statis-
tical. The fundamental differ-
ence between the two approaches
becomes apparent when we analyse
how to get better results. In the case
of rule-based MT systems, transla-
tions get better when you employ
more people to write even better
rules and dictionaries. In the case of
statistical MT systems what you have
to do is get more data, or – to phrase
it more precisely – more aligned (par-
allel) previously translated texts that
can be chopped up into little pieces in
order to be reused as source material
for building new sentences.
The way the computers crunch the
numbers in order to come up with
the statistically most likely transla-
tion stays more or less the same. It
‘Informatics should
be about minimizing
human effort and
making the machines
do the heavy lifting
instead.’
is the quality and sheer amount of
the linguistic data at their core that
determines whether the resulting
translation will be useful. In the light
of the above, it is not surprising that
statistical MT systems – including
the one we are building at the IT Unit
of the DGT - are often called «data-
driven».
Why a data-centric MT model
The central argument in favour of
the data-centric MT model, howev-
er, is that it is easier to double the
amount of data fed into the ma-
chines than to write twice as many
linguistic rules. Building an MT sys-
tem on the basis of linguistic rules
is less efficient and more expensive
because it takes people, more specif-
ically, highly capable and highly paid
linguists, computational linguists and
other language professionals.
But the whole issue cannot be re-
duced to price and effectiveness
alone. Contrary to what many trans-
lators and even many researchers
might think, statistical MT systems
provide better quality than their rule-
based counterparts. One of many
reasons is that, as the number of lin-
guistic rules builds up, they start to
interfere with one another in often
unpredictable ways.
The unique position of DGT
The statistical approach to Machine
Translation has an obvious bot-
tleneck: you have to have a source
from which to draw the data. Moreo-
ver, the data has to come from high
quality human translations that have
been carefully aligned, i.e. put into
pairs of corresponding original and
translated segments.
All over the world, limited availabil-
ity of this precious resource is the
main factor slowing down progress in
MT. At the DGT we are in the unique
position of being the biggest trans-
lation service in the world with the
world’s biggest archive of high qual-
ity human translations (the archive
is known as Euramis, the Translation
Memory database). The wealth of
linguistic resources at our disposal
and its quality is the cornerstone of
our Machine Translation system.

16 01/2013 #6
A BOUT
Even more to our advantage is that,
every day, thousands of DGT transla-
tors are producing even more texts
we can use. All we have to do is to
acquire the fruits of their labour,
store them and convert them for our
purposes.
But how does it work exactly?
The easiest way to imagine prepara-
tion of data for the purposes of MT
is to think of a massive and sophis-
ticated search-and-replace operation
performed on text files. The files are
huge. They contain tens of gigabytes
of data and it often takes hours, if
not days, to process them. Over the
last year the Machine Translation
data team has optimized acquir-
ing data from Euramis, reducing the
time needed to extract and convert
them from almost a week to less
than 24 hours. One of the biggest
‘A glance into the precious resource upon which statistical MT systems are built:
the multilingual data’.
1 Szymon Klocek, formerly with the Polish Translation Department, currently works at the IT Unit of the DGT as Machine Translation data
administrator. He is responsible for acquiring, storing and processing data for the the Commission’s Machine Translation service; his
responsibilities also include managing the MT data team.
01/2013 #6
challenges is weeding out bad data,
which in the context of Euramis are
usually mistagged segments, i.e.
segments labelled as belonging to
one language, whereas in reality they
are written in another. The abun-
dance of available data allows us to
have a relatively restrictive approach
and aggressively filter our linguistic
resources in order to improve their
quality, and thus the quality of the
resulting translation.
When it comes to storage, what bet-
ter solution can there be than the
one that has already proven so ef-
fective? For the purposes of keeping
data for MT we have built a replica
of Euramis. It can be synchronized
overnight with its older brother, it is
customized to our needs, and it is
much faster, as it is not slowed down
by day-to-day requests for Transla-
tion Memory contents. This way our
Machine translation
‘The wealth of linguistic
resources at our
disposal and its quality
is the cornerstone
of our Machine
Translation system:
every day, thousands
of DGT translators are
producing even more
texts we can use.’
own operations do not affect Euramis
and thus do not impact the everyday
work of DGT translators.
Most importantly, however, our
Euramis clone offers flexibility and
has room to grow. It was designed to
contain additional categories of in-
formation and data from new sourc-
es outside the DGT, the Commission,
perhaps even outside the European
institutions.
In the near future
We believe that being able to store
external data collections will prove
crucial in the near future. The reason
is simple: we want to make our Ma-
chine Translation system even better,
and we need more linguistic data.
We are in the process of asking oth-
er European institutions for permis-
sion to use their translation memory
archives. We are working on ways to
draw data from the outside world. If
there is one thing you should know
about the Machine Translation data
team, it is that we are always hungry
for more parallel translations. 
17
 VOICES FROM OUTSIDE Machine translation

Predicting Translation
by Professor Philipp Koehn1, University of Edinburgh

Translation is unpredictable. If you give a text in a foreign language to a

group of translators, you can be sure that each will come up with a different
translation. That is true even if the text consists only of a single sentence with
a few words. So how can computers — which are known for solving exact
problems with exact solutions — expect to come up with correct translations?

T
he first step is to recognize
the variability and uncer-
tainty that underlies the pro-
cess of mapping text in one
language into another. Translating
requires balancing the dual needs of
preserving the text’s meaning (with
most of its nuances) and also pro-
ducing fluent and idiomatic output
that is pleasant to read.
Being explicit about uncertainty leads
to probabilistic models, thus conceiv-
ing a world where everything is pos-
sible, but some things are just more
likely than others. Considering only
a single word, it is easy to see that
it has some probable translations,
maybe even a clearly dominant one,
‘Translating requires
balancing the dual needs
of preserving the text’s
meaning (with most of
its nuances) and also
producing fluent and
id¬iomatic output that is
pleasant to read.’
but also a large tail of other possible
translations — say, when the word is
used as part of a metaphor or in a
very specific context.
Statistical machine translation mod-
els try to estimate the probabilities
of different translations of an input
text, and predict the most probable
one. How do we get all these choices
and probabilities? We get a pretty
good idea by analyzing millions of
words of translated texts, generated
by professional translators over the
last decades.
Bigger, Better, Faster, More networks, Bayesian inference are
the buzz words around the cafeteria
Statistical models have become table of the computer science re-
much more sophisticated in recent searchers who dared to venture into
years. Should we rather reuse large something as fluffy as language.
fragments of prior translations or the
Researchers in the current EU BRIDGE
reliable frequent short chunks? How
project develop algorithms that are
much should we favor knowledge
able to exploit the growing treas-
extracted from texts that are similar
in domain, topic, and style? What
ure chest of past translations more
efficiently. They aim not only at the
is the proper tradeoff between
translation of text, but also of spoken
adequacy (matching the source text’s
meaning) and fluency (producing
input. They scale up their methods to
utilize billions of words of translated
readable output)? How do we set all
the probability values anyway?
texts, more than any human could
read in a lifetime. 
Machine translation has become a
playground for computer scientists More Linguistics
who use it to explore novel methods
in machine learning. Big data, A sentence is not just a string of
structured prediction, deep belief words. There is a lot of structure. De-

18 01/2013 #6
VOICES FROM OUTSIDE
veloping machine translation mod-
els that are properly aware of nouns
and adjectives and subject-verb
agreement and maybe even se-
mantic preferences is an open
challenge to the research
community. Unfortunately,
adding such structure to
statistical models — a
form of hybrid machine
translation — makes
them much more com-
plex. The search for
the best translation be-
comes more error-prone
and slower.
The basic current models,
which just map sequences
of words without any regard to
their syntactic nature, work sur-
prisingly well for language pairs such
as French-English or Spanish- Eng-
lish. But translating between syntac-
tically divergent languages such as
German-English or Czech-English
seems to require deeper linguis-
tic analysis. Our experience shows
significantly lower quality for these
harder language pairs, even more so
when translating from English. The
good news is that we are already
seeing some success from syntax-
based statistical translation mod-
els and there are a lot of promising
ideas.
Aiding Professional Translators
The most popular application of ma-
chine translation is the translation
of web pages and email messages
to gain some understanding of what
a foreign text means, thanks to the
free service of Google Translate. This
use of machine translation has been
integrated by many companies due
1 Philipp Koehn is a professor at the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh. He wrote the textbook on statistical machine
translation, published over 80 academic papers, and co-ordinated several internationally funded research projects. He leads the development
of the open source machine translation system Moses.
01/2013 #6
to the availability of the open source
Moses machine translation system.
The Moses system has been devel-
oped in Europe with the aid from EU
funding such as the ongoing Moses-
Core project.
But the costly task of producing
translations that are of publishable
quality still requires professional hu-
man translators for the foreseeable
future. A key question for machine
translation researchers is: How can
vast statistical models be used to
aid these translators in their work?
The current mode of simply present-
ing a professional translator with
the raw output of some machine
translation engine and asking them
to fix it up, is rather crude and un-
surprisingly encounters resistance
from professional translators, even
if it often speeds up their work.
Machine translation
Two ongoing EU-funded research
projects, CASMACAT and MATECAT,
have set out to develop better
computer-aided machine trans-
lation tools. One main idea is
to develop machine transla-
tion systems that quickly
adapt to a translator’s
task, learn from their
corrections, and thus
never make the same
mistake twice. Another
idea is to change the
way machine transla-
tion output is presented,
by highlighting the more
unreliable parts, show-
ing alternative translations,
making it more transparent
how the machine produced its
output, or providing a more inter-
active authoring and editing process.
These days, we have the onward
march of machine translation re-
search and increasing uptake of the
technology in industry and govern-
ment. While it would be foolish to
predict perfection, we will see better
and more useful translations. Most
probably. 
‘The costly task of
producing translations
that are of publishable
quality still requires
professional human
translators for the
foreseeable future.’
19
VOICES FROM OUTSIDE Machine translation

Choose your own translation future

by Jaap van der Meer, Director of TAUS1 (Translation Automation User Society)

Technology arrived late in the translation services sector. But it is here, and
it is bound to change everything. In the short-term future, everyone in the
world will be able to speak his or her own language and will be understood.
We are entering the Convergence era: translation will be a utility embedded
in every app, device and screen. Businesses will prosper by finding new
customers in new markets. Governments and citizens will connect and
communicate easily. Consumers will become world-wise, communicating
as if language barriers never existed. It will open doors and break down
barriers and it will give a boost to the translation industry, improve the
technology and fill the gaps in global communications.

I
s this picture too rosy? At TAUS, we
believe in the power of translation
data. Translation data is the fuel of
machine translation technology. Data
powers the engines. The engines may nev-
er emulate the human language compe-
tence, but they will be good enough to help
us converse in languages we never spoke
before or will ever speak.
This vision frightens many insiders in the
translation industry. Machine translation
was experimented, tested for a long time,
but it never passed the test of usefulness.
Automation of translation was believed to
be a utopia, at least until the vox populi
revolution spoke and millions of people
started clicking on the automatic translate
button in their search pages. The quality is
often bad and laughable, but people like
the fact that it is under their control and
in real-time.
Entering the Convergence era
As the diagram below shows, the transla-
tion industry has undergone a paradigm
shift every decade since 1980, but none is
as big as the Convergence era.
The volume of information content is ex-
ploding for users. While we make this jour-
ney from the 20th century export mentality
to the 21st century’s open global society,
the mix of expanding language pairs will
mean that a human-driven translation
process alone will not suffice in this new
era.
As we move into the Integration era—en-
terprises and institutions are busy releas-
ing the translation function from its iso-
lated position. The focus is on integrating
translation in enterprise applications such
as content management systems. The
pressure will keep building to translate
more content faster or even translate in
real-time. This opens up tremendous op-
portunities for innovators to seize the con-
vergence instrument and offer new solu-
tions. (See the Agents of Change: Insiders
and Invaders videos.)

Two types of convergence

There are two forms of convergence: pure

technology convergence and a business
model convergence. Technology conver-
gence means combining two or more tech-
nologies to create a new compelling prod-
uct or service. The best example of this is
the mobile phone. It has now become a
life-saving and indispensable kind of ex-
tension to our body. Business model con-

20 01/2013 #6
VOICES FROM OUTSIDE
vergence means merging market offerings
to create a unique new service offer. In the
real world, the emergence of supermarkets
was a form of convergence. In the modern
world, the combined offering of coffee and
music by Starbucks is a good example of
convergence. In the digital world business
model, convergence often has a give-and-
take dimension: the user becomes part of
the supply chain. Innovative examples of
business model convergence are location-
based apps. The user—often without know-
ing it—transmits his or her exact location
and receives perfectly matching offers
from a shop or restaurant.
Convergence in the translation
industry
Convergence in the translation industry
has already started across technologies
and business models. We have seen the
first demonstrations of the integration of
speech and machine translation technol-
ogy. Using tiny keys on your mobile will no
longer be necessary: speech input in one
language, and speech output in another
language. The best example of business
model convergence in the translation in-
dustry is the combination of automatic
translation with search. The owners of
search engines decided to extend the
service to professional translators. The
business model convergence went a step
further: for sharing the translation data
(translation memories) the industry pro-
fessionals received customized (improved
quality) machine translations.
In the next ten years we will see numer-
ous new examples of converging business
models and technologies. Sometimes this
convergence will address just one language
pair, domain or market niche. Sometimes it
will be applicable on a much wider scale.
Together, this convergence is changing the
translation industry completely. Transla-
tion will quickly become a utility embed-
ded in everything we do, as ubiquitous as
electricity and the Internet.
1 http://www.translationautomation.com/
01/2013 #6
Crowd, Cloud and Big Data
Other trends that play along in the Conver-
gence era are Crowd, Cloud and Big Data.
The Crowd is part and parcel of business
model convergence. The Cloud is the natu-
ral infrastructure environment to connect
with the Crowd and to reach the required
scalability and efficiency. But behind the
Crowd and the Cloud is the secret power
of Big Data—the biggest trend of all. The
computer can decipher ambiguity; under-
stand jokes and metaphors, as long as it is
fed enough data.
The importance of Big Data should not be
underestimated. Big Data will push the
performance of automated translation
forward and address challenges in many
different areas. The computer will be able
to run automatic semantic clustering and
genre identification processes. This is vital
for the continuous improvement and cus-
tomization of machine translation technol-
ogy. The computer will also be able to do
terminology mining much better if it gets
more data.
Translation support matching
the new content mix
In the Convergence era, the mix of content
to be translated is shifting further away
from documents and software releases
to bits and pieces of text, voice and video
published on multiple screens. The end-
user and citizen is becoming more in con-
trol. They will drive a continuous stream
of translation of official, social, shared,
earned and also private information.
Translation memory software fits very well
with the updates of static documentation
pushed by publishers but it will not be very
helpful when translating dynamic content
pulled by users. Machine translation tech-
nology will mature quickly and take over
as the primary choice of tools to be used
by the translation service sector. The self-
service real-time training of MT engines
may be applied to every single job.
Machine translation
Translation data fuels the engines and Big
Data techniques will cause breakthroughs
which bring us to a point where we can
say that computers can sometimes—not
always and not in all circumstances—beat
humans in language processing and trans-
lation. So, where does that leave the entre-
preneurs in the translation industry?
‘ Machine translation
technology will mature quickly
and take over as the primary
choice of tools to be used by the
translation service sector.’
Planning for an uncertain
future
In 2010 TAUS organized a series of brain-
storming sessions following the scenario-
based planning methodology with trans-
lation buyer and provider executives in
Copenhagen and Portland (OR) with the
aim of planning for an uncertain future.
The participants were uncertain about the
answers to three questions:
1. Will machine translation take a big role
in the translation industry or not?
2. Do we have to fear that translation will
become a free-for-all service?
3. Will the closed (competitive) or the open
(collaborative) business models prevail?
Two of the three questions have been
answered in the last couple of years. MT
will play a major role in the translation in-
dustry. Translation will not be free. Users
always pay for translation, somewhere.
The third question is still haunting us. We
have not seen clear indicators yet whether
closed models or open models will prevail
References, further reading and the full ver-
sion of this article (see: http://www.transla-
tionautomation.com/articles/choose-your-
own-translation-future).
21
 VOICES FROM OUTSIDE Machine translation

TAPTA4UN: machine translation collaboration between the

United Nations and the World Intellectual Property Organization
by Cecilia Elizalde (Senior Reviser, Spanish Translation Service, currently Project Manager of gText, and Coordinator
of the Technology Advisory Group of the Documentation Division, José García-Verdugo (Reviser and IT Focal Point,
Spanish Translation Service), Ana Larrea (Senior Reviser and Training Officer, Spanish Translation Service) and José María
Perazzo (Senior Reviser, Spanish Translation Service) of the Documentation Division, Department for General Assembly
and Conference Management, of the United Nations Secretariat

TAPTA4UN is the name of a successful machine translation (MT)

collaboration project between the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO) in Geneva and the United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in
New York. In less than six months, the seemingly unfeasible idea of a
customized MT system was made reality by a small team and is now an
everyday tool for dozens of translators.

T
he origin of TAPTA4UN goes
back to the Association for In-
formation Management (ASLIB)
2011 Conference in London, where
Cecilia Elizalde, representing the
Documentation Division of UNHQ, at-
tended a presentation by Christophe
Mazenc and Bruno Pouliquen, of
WIPO, on an MT system for patents,
namely the Translation Assistant for
Patent Titles and Abstracts (TAPTA).
The presentation described a statisti-
cal machine translation (SMT) system
using open-source Moses technology
and an ad hoc, Java-based web user
interface. WIPO clients were offered
this method in order to ‘accelerate’
‘In less than six months,
the seemingly unfeasible
idea of a customized MT
system was made reality by
a small team and is now an
everyday tool for dozens of
translators.’
the compulsory translation of their
patents into English and French.
Following this contact, an agreement
was reached by the two parties. The
UNHQ Spanish Translation Service
would provide a bilingual (English-
Spanish) corpus comprising 11 years
of cost and quality. The system was
of United Nations documentation,
successfully set up in less than two
and the development team at WIPO
months with no financial expense
would use those materials to train
to either organization. The perfor-
the existing TAPTA system in order
mance of the resulting translator,
to set up a free-text web-based
called TAPTA4UN, was deemed to be
machine translation system for the
highly satisfactory (using both auto-
English-Spanish language pair. The
matic and human evaluation). High
bilingual corpus was prepared and
BLEU scores were consistently achie-
pre-processed by the Spanish Trans-
lation Service using available HTML ved using different samples. A blind
bitexts. The corpus had to undergo human evaluation involving 1,000
further processing before being fed segments and three reviewers was
into the Moses system. performed, during which the revisers
decided to maintain most of the au-
A number of UNHQ translators had
tomated content in the translations
(in a 1-5 scale, the adequacy score
been requesting the purchase of a
was slightly above 4, and the fluency
machine translation system for some
time. For this reason, one of the goals
score was 3.94).
of the experiment was to see how an
ad hoc system would compare to the Most users of the English-Spanish
readily available MT alternatives in pair, particularly senior revisers, im-
the market (namely Google Trans- mediately showed great enthusiasm
late and Bing Translator) in terms for TAPTA4UN. Senior staff were

22 01/2013 #6
VOICES FROM OUTSIDE
impressed by the ability of the sys-
tem to match existing terminology.
In specific contexts, such as Gene-
ral Assembly resolutions and UN
budget documentation, TAPTA4UN
results were found to be particularly
accurate. That, in turn, was consi-
dered a big advantage because it
involved great savings in typing and
reviewing. Finally, translations from
the new system were generally dee-
med to be superior to those provided
by Google Translate or Bing Trans-
lator. Since those advantages were
pointed out by a significant number
of senior staff, the project quickly
gained momentum within the UNHQ
translation services.
Building upon that success, the De-
partment for General Assembly and
Conference Management (DGACM)
of UNHQ decided to continue with
the experiment. In October 2012,
WIPO and UNHQ collaborated to
implement the system in production
in cloud servers for the remaining
language pairs (English to Arabic,
Chinese, French and Russian). They
also transferred the source code and
necessary knowledge to a team of
IT specialists and linguists in New
York during a dedicated one-week
workshop. As the testing equipment
in Geneva was no longer available,
the Department authorized the pur-
chase of cloud space for the training
and hosting of these new language
models.
Preparations are currently under
way to evaluate the resulting cloud
implementations for Arabic, Chinese,
French and Russian, which are
already up and running. Preliminary
testing by translators and revisers
shows mixed results, from good qua-
lity for Chinese to unsatisfactory per-
formance in Russian. Those results
accurately reflect known linguistic
issues related to those target lan-
guages.
01/2013 #6
IT staff at UNHQ have been trained
by the WIPO development team in
setup, training, maintenance and
troubleshooting issues. There is an
ongoing and close collaboration
between them in order to fine-tune
the existing systems according to
the feedback provided by users.
Improvements in the quality of the
output are usually slow, since they
relate directly to the active partici-
pation of users, and are highly lan-
guage-dependent.
Since Moses-based SMT language
models are essentially a static, im-
mutable “picture” of the bilingual
corpus, there is a need to periodically
update the whole system to incorpo-
rate newly translated materials. It is
expected that language models will
be updated twice a year. The IT team
at UNHQ is working on a streamli-
ned and efficient method for those
updates.
Besides the traditional gist trans-
lation web-based interface, TAP-
TA4UN has been integrated in the
CAT workflow by means of a plug-
in for SDL Trados Studio 2011,
the standard translation memory
software used at UNHQ. That plug-
in has been built using SDL’s appli-
cation programming interface (API)
by Michal Ziemski, a developer at
UNHQ who is currently in charge
of the general setup and mainte-
nance of TAPTA4UN. Once instal-
led, the plug-in allows users to add
TAPTA4UN as a “language provider”
to their current translation project,
along with their translation memo-
ries and terminology databases. The
plug-in automatically chooses the
language combination and shows
MT output when the translation
memory contains no matches with
scores above 80%. The TAPTA4UN
plug-in for Trados Studio is currently
in active development and users are
being requested to submit their ex-
periences and comments on the per-
Machine translation
formance of this software. There are
also plans to create a full-document
translation interface for TAPTA4UN.
Since both the gist translation inter-
face and the plug-in are fully web-
based, translators are able to use
the system from any place in the
world, as long as they have an Inter-
net connection. UN offices in Geneva,
Nairobi, Santiago and Vienna have
been using TAPTA4UN seamlessly for
several months.
‘Since both the gist
translation interface
and the plug-in are fully
web-based, translators
are able to use the
system from any place
in the world, as long as
they have an Internet
connection.’
The Department for General Assem-
bly and Conference Management
(DGACM) of the UN has recently
launched a global project called
gText to implement a set of inte-
grated language tools in four duty
stations. Those tools are being deve-
loped at the United Nations Office in
Vienna. The project is now in its ini-
tial stage and TAPTA4UN is already
being integrated with Mercury, the
centrepiece of gText. Mercury will be
the end-user part of gText and will
integrate automated referencing, bi-
texts, full-text search, the UN termi-
nology portal, CAT and MT, in a web-
based interface that is user friendly
and accessible to all UN translators,
including contractors. 
23
 I NTERVIEW Machine translation

Interview with Rytis Martikonis

Director General of DGT

Machine translation: a tool to embrace and master

DGT recently organised a conference on machine

translation — MT@WORK — the first of its kind. What
was the aim of the conference and why organise it now?
Machine translation, our most advanced working tool, has
become an essential part of our everyday life. This is why we
had been thinking of organising an event dedicated to the
topic, and no better time to do it than now as in 2012 we
started testing the machine translation system we are devel-
oping in DGT. In 2013 it will be extended to the rest of the
Commission. It was a great pleasure to see the idea of an event
dedicated to this project take shape. The conference brought
people from the translation services of the EU institutions
together to discuss the challenges related to machine transla-
tion and the possibilities and opportunities it offers. The aim
was not to preach to people about machine translation, rather
it was a meeting organised by practitioners for practitioners.
The European Commission has invested a lot in this tech-
This was the first of three conferences we intend to host each
nology, notably in its programmes on research, technological
year from now on. In 2013, we will explore the needs of other
development and innovation. In 2010, DGT decided to de-
users (non-translators) in the Commission and other EU in-
velop a data-based system instead of a rule-based one in a bid
stitutions. In 2014, we will focus on the needs of the national
to keep pace with technological progress and cater for more
authorities of EU Member States, to show the importance
languages.
DGT gives to machine translation and cooperation.
Our MT@EC project is supported as a policy objective of the
We can indeed say that DGT and the European European Commission and financed by public funds. We are
Commission attach a lot of importance to machine working on it in cooperation with other Commission Direc-
translation. Could you give any particular reason for this? torates-General, namely DIGIT and CNECT. It is one of our
flagship initiatives, linked to the objectives of the European
As the EU’s largest translation service, DGT is a hub of expe-
Digital Agenda, which inspires initiatives such as e-health,
rience, data and technology, a giant laboratory for language
e-justice and the Internal Market Information system. Such
technologies. Euramis, the translation memory database
new initiatives could create a substantial demand for transla-
which stores the data used to build our statistical machine
tion that machine translation might help meet. That is why
translation engines, was designed in the 1990s and now con-
we are investing in the system in cooperation with other DGs.
tains about half a billion sentences.

Since your appointment as Director-General of DGT you

have actively supported machine translation. What do
‘DGT is a hub of experience, data you see as its added value for DGT internally?
and technology, a giant laboratory Firstly, developing our own machine translation system is a
for language technologies.’ way of exploiting our linguistic expertise and of building on
our corpora. Secondly, it ensures that we remain independent

24 01/2013 #6
I NTERVIEW
and retain ownership of intellectual property, thus helping us
to avoid or mitigate the problems we had in the past.
Thirdly, we can see now that machine translation is a fact of
everyday life in the translation world, including the institu-
tional translation world. In my view, machine translation is
a tool for translators to embrace, to use and to master. As
experts, we in DGT are well placed to do that — to show the
possibilities it offers, but also to show its limitations. We need
to show that the translation services of the European institu-
tions are able to keep up with progress in this area.
However, let me stress that I believe translation is and will
remain a human activity. Machines will not be translating for
machines. They will be there to help us.
Last but not least, in the present context of staff cuts and re-
ductions in the EU’s administrative expenditure, along with
the expected increase in translation demand, we are obliged to
do better with less. Machine translation can help us cope with
resource constraints and meet new types of demand, such as
the kinds of translation required by the new services linked to
the Digital Agenda I mentioned earlier.
The MT@Work Conference was an interinstitutional
event. What is the role of interinstitutional
cooperation in this area?
Machine translation has already been defined as one of the
priorities for cooperation by the Interinstitutional Commit-
tee on Translation and Interpretation (ICTI), where nine EU
institutions come together to tackle issues of common inter-
est. One purpose of the MT@Work Conference was therefore
to provide a forum where translators from the European insti-
tutions could meet and discuss how machine translation can
offer added value for their work.
And what is DGT’s role in this area at the international
level?
One reason for our international presence in this area is the
dialogue with other international organisations that have sim-
ilar needs and constraints. This was reflected at the conference
in a very good presentation given by Spanish translators from
the United Nations’ translation service in New York. We are
also present at other fora, such as JIAMCATT (International
Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Ter-
minology). Josep Bonet, Head of our Informatics Unit, is
Chair of its Liaison Committee this year.
Coming back to DGT, what use is actually made of
machine translation in-house?
We now have 52 language pairs. A recent survey showed that
about one third of DGT translators use machine translation
in some or all of their translation jobs. For me, this is also
something to work on in the future: to see how we use it,
01/2013 #6
Machine translation
how we manage it and how each translator builds machine
translation into his or her working method. We have an MT
User Group, chaired by the recently appointed MT Adviser,
Daniel Kluvanec, which maps best practices and evaluates the
process.
The new CAT tool will bring about a big change this year.
From what I understand, machine translation will be more
user-friendly as a result, because it will be built into the new
tool.
A recent translators’ satisfaction survey on the use
of machine translation in DGT showed a wide range
of perceptions: some find it useful, others don’t. What
could explain this diversity of opinions?
It depends on the complexity of the language. For languages
with relatively similar structures, such as English, French,
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and even Bulgarian, machine
translation produces good results. However, there is still a lot
to do for Estonian, Hungarian and German. Sometimes it is
a generational issue: older translators might prefer different
working methods.
What steps do you plan on taking in the near future?
We want the new MT@EC system to cover all the official EU
languages at least. We want it to be a system the EU institu-
tions will fully own, and one that will get the most out of
internal resources and of course ensure confidentiality.
Since July 2011, our translators and IT staff, staff in other Di-
rectorates-General (MOVE, EAC, RTD, ELARG, HR, SG,
COMP, CNECT, MARKT, OP, TAXUD and JRC) and in
some other EU institutions have been testing the new system.
We plan to make it available to all the Commission DGs by
mid-2013. Although DGT’s needs come first, we are working
on developing customised MT engines for other Commission
DGs and EU institutions. We are also thinking of making it
available to the public bodies of EU Member States.
To sum up, DGT is more than willing to cooperate with
other organisations or institutions and is keen to do so at all
levels. 
‘I believe translation is and will
remain a human activity. Machines
will not be translating for machines.
They will be there to help us.’
25
U SEFUL INFORMATION Machine translation

John Hutchins:
the recognised historian of Machine Translation
John Hutchins has been widely recognised as the historian of Machine Translation (MT) for dec-
ades and his website is a repository of both historical and up to date information on the evolution
of MT. It also offers a Compendium of Translation Software, a comprehensive list of current soft-
ware, commercial products and vendors. 

Research in the field of Language Technologies

The European Commission has been supporting research in the field of Language Technologies since the 1980s, in
particular through its Framework Programmes on Research and Technological Development and its Innovation Pro-
gramme1, as well as through initiatives of the Joint Research Centre2.
Also, some Member States support applications in this field, for example, Apertium, an open-source rule-based system
which is funded by the Spanish Government.

In addition, there are open-source applications, such as the Moses for Mere Mortals scripts, which make MT easier to
install and use and therefore more accessible to a larger number of users. 

1 http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/projects_en.html
2 http://langtech.jrc.it/JRC_Resources.html

HIGHLIGHTS
From the websites of some EU-funded MT research projects:

Machine translation is a complex field and presents substantial barriers for entry to potential researchers, and to poten-
tial users of the technologies. The principal aim of the MosesCore project is to reduce these barriers, making it easier to
join and participate in the MT research community, and easier to become an MT user. Through the coordination of freely
available shared software and data, and by organising appropriate networking events, the research and adoption of MT
in Europe will be stimulated. The result of the project will be the broader use of Machine Translation systems, better
quality of the Moses MT engine and the organisation of events and promotion of open-source software for machine
translation, notably the Moses statistical MT toolkit. 

Based on insights gained in the cognitive studies, the project will develop novel types of assistance to human translators (interactive
translation prediction, interactive editing, adaptive translation models) and integrate them into a new workbench, consisting of an editor,
a server, and analysis and visualization tools. The workbench will be designed in a modular fashion and can be combined with existing
computer aided translation tools. The outcome of the CASMACAT project will be made available as open-source software to industry,
academia, and to individual end-users. 

Recent achievements by the so-called statistical MT approach have raised new expectations in the translation industry.
So far, statistical MT has focused on providing ready-to-use translations, rather than outputs that minimize the effort of a
human translator. The MateCat project aims at pushing what can be considered the new frontier of CAT technology: how
to effectively integrate statistical MT within the translation workflow. All prototypes will be released as open-source. 

26 01/2013 #6
U SEFUL INFORMATION Machine translation

From websites of some other EU-funded research projects,

initiatives and networks:

Analysis and Evaluation of Comparable Corpora for Under-Resourced Areas of Machine Trans-
lation. It addresses the widely recognized bottleneck of insufficient parallel corpora for data-
driven MT systems.
Development of automatic transcription and translation technology that will permit the devel-
opment of innovative multimedia captioning and translation services of audiovisual documents
between European and non-European languages.
Aims at developing a common vision of the area and fostering a European strategy for con-
solidating the sector, thus enhancing competitiveness at EU level and worldwide. Through the
exploitation of new collaborative modalities as well as workshops and meetings, FLaReNet will
sustain international cooperation and (re)create a wide Language community.
Our mission is to increase confidence in machine translation. Therefore we make the online
translation service accessible on the internet for free in 24 hours a day.

With LetsMT you can easily build and run your own custom machine translation systems. Simply
upload your own corpora and/or choose to use any of the publicly available corpora. Train your
systems and use them for all your translation needs.
The Language Interoperability Portfolio Project is a collaborative project developing an open,
vendor-independent format that can be used by many different translation tools to package
translation materials.
Network of Excellence consisting of 57 research centres from 33 countries, is dedicated to
building the technological foundations of a multilingual European information society.
This initiative is concerned with standards and best practices that support the creation, localiza-
tion and use of multilingual web-based information. Through W3C workshops open to the public
and various communication channels, it spreads information about what standards and best
practices currently exist, and what gaps need to be filled.
Uses JRC developed technology to automatically generate daily news summaries, allowing us-
ers to see, namely: the major news stories (news clusters) in various languages for any specific
day and to compare how the same events have been reported in the media written in different
languages; the list of most mentioned names and find further automatically derived informa-
tion.
Open Data portals are one aspect in facilitating access to and re-use of public sector informa-
tion. Citizens and business sometimes find it difficult to identify what type of information exists
and by which public authority it is held. A number of countries, regions and municipalities have
therefore created portal websites on public data.
It is about the creation of a factory of Language Resources (LRs) in the form of a production
line that automates all of the steps involved in the acquisition, production, updating and main-
tenance of the LRs required by Machine Translation and by other Language Technologies.

The Patent Language Translation Online Project addresses the problem of the increased need
for translation given the current Intellectual Property (IP) landscape. Despite attempts to unify
the patent system in Europe, there is still significant translation burden when seeking patent
validation. Additionally, increased patenting activity across the world, particularly in Asia, means
that more and more prior art exists in a “foreign” language, creating a further need for transla-
tion by patent searchers and examiners.
By Maria José Machado, PT translator

01/2013 #6 27
 Q UOTATION
COORDINATION
AND DRAFTING:
‘The future author is one who
Anabela Pereira
discovers that language, the
(+32) 229 65728 exploration and manipulation of
DGT.02 the resources of language, will
serve him in winning through
GRAPHIC, to his way.’
LAYOUT AND
TYPESETTER:
Thornton Wilder (1897–1975),
Philippe Marchetto U.S. novelist, dramatist. Interview in Writers at Work,
(+352) 4301 36337 First Series, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1958).