A widely used machine translation service and its migration to a free/open-source solution: the case of Softcatalà

Xavier Ivars-Ribes, Victor M. Sánchez-Cartagena


Abstract
Softcatala` is a non-profit association created more than 10 years ago to fight the marginalisation of the Catalan language in information and communication technologies. It has led the localisation of many applications and the creation of a website which allows its users to translate texts between Spanish and Catalan using an external closedsource translation engine. Recently, the closed-source translation back-end has been replaced by a free/open-source solution completely managed by Softcatala`: the Apertium machine translation platform and the ScaleMT web service framework. Thanks to the openness of the new solution, it is possible to take advantage of the huge amount of users of the Softcatala` translation service to improve it, using a series of methods presented in this paper. In addition, a study of the translations requested by the users has been carried out, and it shows that the translation back-end change has not affected the usage patterns.
Anthology ID:
2011.freeopmt-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-Based Machine Translation
Month:
January 20-21
Year:
2011
Address:
Barcelona, Spain
Editors:
Felipe Sánchez-Martinez, Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz
Venue:
FreeOpMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
61–68
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2011.freeopmt-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xavier Ivars-Ribes and Victor M. Sánchez-Cartagena. 2011. A widely used machine translation service and its migration to a free/open-source solution: the case of Softcatalà. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Free/Open-Source Rule-Based Machine Translation, pages 61–68, Barcelona, Spain.
Cite (Informal):
A widely used machine translation service and its migration to a free/open-source solution: the case of Softcatalà (Ivars-Ribes & Sánchez-Cartagena, FreeOpMT 2011)
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https://aclanthology.org/2011.freeopmt-1.10.pdf