This paper addresses a customization process of a Korean-English MT system for patent translation. The major customization steps include terminology construction, linguistic study, and the modification of the existing analysis and generation-module. T o our knowledge, this is the first worth-mentioning large-scale customization effort of an MT system for Korean and English. This research was performed under the auspices of the MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication) of Korean government. A prototype patent MT system for electronics domain was installed and is being tested in the Korean Intellectual Property Office.

This paper addresses the workflow for terminology construction for Korean-English patent MT system. The workflow consists of the stage for setting lexical goals and the semi- automatic terminology construction stage. As there is no comparable system, it is difficult to determine how many terms are needed. To estimate the number of the needed terms, we analyzed 45,000 patent documents. Given the limited time and budget, we resorted to the semi-automatic methods to create the bilingual term dictionary in electronics domain. We will show that parenthesis information in Korean patent documents and bilingual title corpus can be successfully used to build a bilingual term dictionary.