TransSearch: What are translators looking for?

Elliott Macklovitch, Guy Lapalme, Fabrizio Gotti


Abstract
Notwithstanding machine translation’s impressive progress over the last decade, many translators remain convinced that the output of even the best MT systems is not sufficient to facilitate the production of publication-quality texts. To increase their productivity they turn instead to translator support tools. We examine the use of one such tool: TransSearch, an online bilingual concordancer. From the millions of requests stored in the system’s logs over a 6-year period, we extracted and analyzed the most frequently submitted queries, in an effort to characterize the kinds of problems for which translators turn to this system for help. What we discover, somewhat surprisingly, is that our system seems particularly well-suited to help translate highly polysemous adverbials and prepositional phrases.
Anthology ID:
2008.amta-govandcom.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Government and Commercial Uses of MT
Month:
October 21-25
Year:
2008
Address:
Waikiki, USA
Venue:
AMTA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Note:
Pages:
412–419
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2008.amta-govandcom.17
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elliott Macklovitch, Guy Lapalme, and Fabrizio Gotti. 2008. TransSearch: What are translators looking for?. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Government and Commercial Uses of MT, pages 412–419, Waikiki, USA. Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.
Cite (Informal):
TransSearch: What are translators looking for? (Macklovitch et al., AMTA 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2008.amta-govandcom.17.pdf