Pattern-based machine translation systems can be easily customized by adding new patterns. To gain full profits from this character, input of patterns should be both expressive and simple to understand. The pattern-based machine translation system we have developed simplifies the handling of features in patterns by allowing sharing constraints between non-terminal symbols, and implementing an automated scheme of feature inheritance between syntactic classes. To avoid conflicts inherent to the pattern-based approach the system has priority control between patterns and between dictionaries. This approach proved its scalability in the web-based collaborative translation environment ‘Yakushite Net.’

This paper describes an implementation of Collaborative Translation Environment ‘Yakushite Net’. In ‘Yakushite Net’, Internet users collaborate in enhancing the dictionaries of their specialty fields, and the system thus improves and expands its accuracy and areas of translations. In the course of realization of this system, we encountered several technical challenges. We would like to first explain those challenges, and then the solutions to them. Our future plan will also be explained at the end.

This paper describes a comprehensive translation environment build on the Internet. This environment is designed not only to translate web pages but also to support translation work on the web. We first introduce a basic idea and implementation of this environment and then compare it to conventional machine translation (MT) systems available on the web and translation memories.