MT Development, Research and Deployment: Where do we stand in America? Elliott Macklovitch Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA)

2 Caveat emptor This is a vast topic! – America is a very big place... – I don't pretend to have all the information Globalisation: – increasingly difficult to partition the world into hermetic geographic regions – many of the major players now present and active on all the continents

3 Developments in commercial MT almost all vendors of general-purpose MT who targeted professional TRs have either gone out of business, or are doing a very different kind of business today – most significant development in last 10 years! – tells us something very important about classic model of MT collaboration (= post-editing)

4 Where have the MT engines gone? Onto the Web, of course! – “free translation” for a surprising range of L's : – or embedded as an add-on to other applications, e.g. IR (AltaVista) or on-line chat (Amikai) online MT is rendering a great public service – … but can it turn a profit?

5 MT Research MT research is definitely on the upswing! – in universities as well as in the private sector, e.g. Microsoft, AT&T, IBM almost all the new projects are (at least partially) in the data-driven paradigm – ISI, AT&T, UofMaryland, IBM – Microsoft – the empirical vs. rationalist debate is dead

6 MT Research - 2 Why this renewal of interest & investment in MT research now? – growing globalisation increases the demand for multilingual documentation – existing MT technology still not up to the task – the looming crisis in the translation industry the rewards for even a partial solution will be substantial

7 Computer-assisted Translation if preceding analysis is correct, CAT tools should be in strong demand -- and they are! but Translation Memory technology seems to have peaked – cost-effective only for highly repetitive texts – exploits only a small portion of the knowledge residing in translators’ past production – freelancers resent receiving TM output

8 Other types of CAT tools in Canada, a number of new bi-textual IR systems on the market: – TSrali.com: Web-based bilingual concordancer – LogiTerm, MultiTrans: term management plus bi-textual IR on translation service archives novel applications for probabilistic translation models – TransType: a new take on interactive MT

9 Conclusions translation industry is booming in America! – MT's market share remains relatively marginal MT has migrated to the Web, where it is rendering a great public service (gisting) – yet few professional TRs use MT day-to-day the paradigm shift in NLP: the effects on translation automation are just beginning to be felt