and disseminating in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge
and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors,
the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well
as a machine de guerre which served to propagate Enlightened ideas [...] The
impact of the Encyclopédie was enormous, not only in its original edition, but
also in multiple reprintings in smaller formats and in later adaptations. It was
hailed, and also persecuted, as the sum of modern knowledge, as the monument to
the progress of reason in the eighteenth century. Through its attempt to
classify learning and to open all domains of human activity to its readers, the
Encyclopédie gave expression to many of the most important intellectual and
social developments of its time."
At present, while work continues on the fully navigational, full-text version,
ARTFL is providing public access on its website to the Prototype Demonstration
of Volume One. From Autumn 1998 a preliminary version is released for
consultation by all ARTFL subscribers.
Mentioned on the ARTFL home page in the Reference Collection, other ARTFL
projects are: the 1st (1694) and 5th (1798) editions of the Dictionnaire de
L'Académie française; Jean Nicot's Trésor de la langue française (1606)
Dictionary; Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1740 edition)
(text of an image-only version); The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus;
Roget's Thesaurus, 1911 edition; Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary; the
French Bible by Louis Segond and parallel Bibles in German, Latin, and English,
etc.
Created by Michael S. Hart in 1971, the Project Gutenberg was the first
information provider on the Internet. It is now the oldest digital library on
the Web, and the biggest considering the number of works (1,500) which has been
digitalized for it, with 45 new titles per month. Michael Hart's purpose is to
put on the Web as many literary texts as possible for free.
In his e-mail of August 23, 1998, Michael S. Hart explained:
"We consider e-text to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper,
other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly
compete once people each find their own comfortable way to e-texts, especially
in schools. [...] My own personal goal is to put 10,000 e-texts on the Net, and
if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to
also expand our potential audience for the average e-text from 1.x% of the world
population to over 10%... thus changing our goal from giving away
1,000,000,000,000 e-texts to 1,000 time as many... a trillion and a quadrillion
in US terminology."
Project Gutenberg is now developing its foreign collections, as announced in the
Newsletter of October 1997. In the Newsletter of March 1998, Michael S. Hart
mentioned that Project Gutenberg's volunteers were now working on e-texts in
French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and he was also hoping to get some
e-texts in the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto,
Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Polish,
Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, and Valencian (Catalan).
3.5. Terminological Databases
The free consultation of terminological databases on the Web is much appreciated
by language specialists. There are some terminological databases maintained by
international organizations, such as Eurodicautom, maintained by the Translation
Service of the European Commission; ILOTERM, maintained by the International
Labour Organization (ILO), the ITU Telecommunication Terminology Database
(TERMITE), maintained by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the
WHO Terminology Information System (WHOTERM), maintained by the World Health
Organization (WHO).
Eurodicautom is the multilingual terminological database of the Translation
Service of the European Commission. Initially developed to assist in-house
translators, it is consulted today by an increasing number of European Union
officials other than translators, as well as by language professionals
throughout the world. Its huge, constantly updated, contents is drafted in
twelve languages (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek,
Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish), and covers a broad spectrum of
human knowledge, while the main core relates to European Union topics.
ILOTERM is the quadrilingual (English, French, German, Spanish) terminology
database maintained by the Terminology and Reference Unit of the Official
Documentation Branch (OFFDOC) of the International Labour Office (ILO), Geneva,
Switzerland. Its primary purpose is to provide solutions, reflecting current
usage, to terminological problems in the social and labor fields. Terms are
entered in English with their French, Spanish and/or German equivalents. The
database also includes records (in up to four languages) concerning the
structure and programmes of the ILO, official names of international
institutions, national bodies and employers' and workers' organizations, as well
as titles of international meetings and instruments.
The ITU Telecommunication Terminology Database (TERMITE) is maintained by the
Terminology, References and Computer Aids to Translation Section of the
Conference Department of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU),
Geneva, Switzerland. TERMITE (59,000 entries) is a quadrilingual (English,
French, Spanish, Russian) terminological database which contains all the terms
which appeared in ITU printed glossaries since 1980, as well as more recent
entries relating to the different activities of the Union.
Maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, Switzerland, the WHO
Terminology Information System (WHOTERM) includes: the WHO General Dictionary
Index, giving access to an English glossary of terms, with the French and
Spanish equivalents for each term; three glossaries in English: Health for All,
Programme Development and Management, and Health Promotion; the WHO TermWatch,
an awareness service of the Technical Terminology, which is a service reflecting
the current WHO usage -- but not necessarily terms officially approved by WHO --
and a series of links to health-related terminology
4. TRANSLATION RESOURCES
[In this chapter:]
[4.1. Translation Services / 4.2. Machine Translation / 4.3. Computer-Assisted
Translation]
4.1. Translation Services
Maintained by Vorontsoff, Wesseling & Partners, Amsterdam, the Netherlands,
Aquarius is a directory of translators and interpreters including 6,100
translators, 800 translation companies, 91 specialized areas of expertise and
369 language combinations. This non-commercial project helps to locate and
contact the best translators in the world directly, without intermediaries or
agencies. Aquarius Database can be searched using location, language combination
and specialization.
Founded by Bill Dunlap, Euro-Marketing Associates proposes Global Reach, a
methodology for companies to expand their Internet presence into a more
international framework. this includes translating a website into other
languages, actively promoting it and using local banner advertising to increase
local website traffic in all on-line countries. Bill Dunlap explains:
"Promoting your website is at least as important as creating it, if not more
important. You should be prepared to spend at least as much time and money in
promoting your website as you did in creating it in the first place. With the
"Global Reach" program, you can have it promoted in countries where English is
not spoken, and achieve a wider audience... and more sales. There are many good
reasons for taking the on-line international market seriously. "Global Reach" is
a means for you to extend your website to many countries, speak to on-line
visitors in their own language and reach on-line markets there."
In his e-mail of December 11, 1998, he also explains what the use of the
Internet brought in his professional life:
"Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved with bringing
American companies in Europe. This is very much an issue of language, since the
products and their marketing have to be in the languages of Europe in order for
them to be visible here. Since the Web became popular in 1995 or so, I've turned
these activities to their on-line dimension, and have come to champion European
e-commerce among my fellow American compatriates. Most lately at Internet World
in New York, I spoke about European e-commerce and how to use a website to
address the various markets in Europe."
4.2. Machine Translation
Machine translation (MT) is the automated process of translating from one
natural language to another. MT analyzes the language text in the source
language and automatically generates corresponding text in the target language.
Characterized by the absence of any human intervention during the translation
process, machine translation (MT) is also called "fully automatic machine
translation (FAMT)". It differs from "machine-aided human translation (MAHT)" or
"computer-assisted translation (CAT)", which involves some interaction between
the translator and the computer.
As SYSTRAN, a company specialized in translation software, explains on its
website:
"Machine translation software translates one natural language into another
natural language. MT takes into account the grammatical structure of each
language and uses rules to transfer the grammatical structure of the source
language (text to be translated) into the target language (translated text). MT
cannot replace a human translator, nor is it intended to."
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) gives the following
definition:
"Machine translation (MT) is the application of computers to the task of
translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest
pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a
number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is
of sufficient quality to be useful for certain specific applications, usually in
the domain of technical documentation. In addition, translation software
packages which are designed primarily to assist the human translator in the
production of translations are enjoying increasing popularity within
professional translation organizations."
Machine translation is the earliest type of natural language processing. Here
are the explanations given by Globalink:
"From the very beginning, machine translation (MT) and natural language
processing (NLP) have gone hand-in-hand with the evolution of modern
computational technology. The development of the first general-purpose
programmable computers during World War II was driven and accelerated by Allied
cryptographic efforts to crack the German Enigma machine and other wartime
codes. Following the war, the translation and analysis of natural language text
provided a testbed for the newly emerging field of Information Theory.
During the 1950s, research on Automatic Translation (known today as Machine
Translation, or 'MT') took form in the sense of literal translation, more
commonly known as word-for-word translations, without the use of any linguistic
rules.
The Russian project initiated at Georgetown University in the early 1950s
represented the first systematic attempt to create a demonstrable machine
translation system. Throughout the decade and into the 1960s, a number of
similar university and government-funded research efforts took place in the
United States and Europe. At the same time, rapid developments in the field of
Theoretical Linguistics, culminating in the publication of Noam Chomsky's
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), revolutionized the framework for the
discussion and understanding of the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics
of human language.
In 1966, the U.S. government-issued ALPAC report offered a prematurely negative
assessment of the value and prospects of practical machine translation systems,
effectively putting an end to funding and experimentation in the field for the
next decade. It was not until the late 1970s, with the growth of computing and
language technology, that serious efforts began once again. This period of
renewed interest also saw the development of the Transfer model of machine
translation and the emergence of the first commercial MT systems.
While commercial ventures such as SYSTRAN and METAL began to demonstrate the
viability, utility and demand for machine translation, these mainframe-bound
systems also illustrated many of the problems in bringing MT products and
services to market. High development cost, labor-intensive lexicography and
linguistic implementation, slow progress in developing new language pairs,
inaccessibility to the average user, and inability to scale easily to new
platforms are all characteristics of these second-generation systems."
A number of companies are specialized in machine translation development, such
as Lernout & Hauspie, Globalink, Logos or SYSTRAN.
Based in Ieper (Belgium) and Burlington (Massachussets, USA), Lernout & Hauspie
(L&H) is an international leader in the development of advanced speech
technology for various commercial applications and products. The company offers
four core technologies - automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech
(TTS), text-to-text and digital speech compression. Its ASR, TTS and digital
speech compression technologies are licensed to main companies in the
telecommunications, computers and multimedia, consumer electronics and
automotive electronics industries. Its text-to-text (translation) services are
provided to information technology (IT) companies and vertical and automation
markets.
The Machine Translation Group of Lernout & Hauspie comprises enterprises that
develop, produce, and market highly sophisticated machine translation systems:
L&H Language Technology, AppTek, AILogic, NeocorTech and Globalink. Each is an
international leader in its particular segment.
Founded in 1990, Globalink is a major U.S. company in language translation
software and services, which offers customized translation solutions built
around a range of software products, on-line options and professional
translation services. The company publishes language translation software
products in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and English, and finds
solutions to translation problems faced by individuals and small businesses, to
multinational corporations and governments (a stand-alone product that gives a
fast, draft translation or a full system to manage professional document
translations). Globalink explains its corporate information on its website as
follows:
"With Globalink's translation applications, the computer uses three sets of
data: the input text, the translation program and permanent knowledge sources
(containing a dictionary of words and phrases of the source language), and
information about the concepts evoked by the dictionary and rules for sentence
development. These rules are in the form of linguistic rules for syntax and
grammar, and some are algorithms governing verb conjugation, syntax adjustment,
gender and number agreement and word re-ordering.
Once the user has selected the text and set the machine translation process in
motion the program begins to match words of the input text with those stored in
its dictionary. Once a match is found, the application brings up a complete
record that includes information on possible meanings of the word and its
contextual relationship to other words that occur in the same sentence. The time
required for the translation depends on the length of the text. A three-page,
750-word document takes about three minutes to render a first draft
translation."
Randy Hobler is a Marketing Consultant for Globalink. He is currently acting as
the Product Marketing Manager for Globalink's suite of Internet based products
and services. In his e-mail of 3 September 1998, he wrote:
"85% of the content of the Web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend
is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries,
but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing
use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.
Because the Internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is
bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of
multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call
'Language Nations'... all those people on the Internet wherever they may be, for
whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language
nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of
Hispanic users in the US, as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco.
Language Transparency: We are rapidly reaching the point where highly accurate
machine translation of text and speech will be so common as to be embedded in
computer platforms, and even in chips in various ways. At that point, and as the
growth of the Web slows, the accuracy of language translation hits 98% plus, and
the saturation of language pairs has covered the vast majority of the market,
language transparency (any-language-to-any-language communication) will be too
limiting a vision for those selling this technology. The next development will
be 'transcultural, transnational transparency', in which other aspects of human
communication, commerce and transactions beyond language alone will come into
play. For example, gesture has meaning, facial movement has meaning and this
varies among societies. The thumb-index finger circle means 'OK' in the United
States. In Argentina, it is an obscene gesture.
When the inevitable growth of multi-media, multi-lingual videoconferencing comes
about, it will be necessary to 'visually edit' gestures on the fly. The MIT
Media Lab [MIT: Massachussets Institute of Technology], Microsoft and many
others are working on computer recognition of facial expressions, biometric
access identification via the face, etc. It won't be any good for a U.S.
business person to be making a great point in a Web-based multi-lingual video
conference to an Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect
Argentinian Spanish if he makes the 'O' gesture at the same time. Computers can
intercept this kind of thing and edit them on the fly.
There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and most of
these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture to the other.
They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics, currency conversions,
clothing size differences, metric versus English system differences, etc., etc.
Enterprising companies will be capturing and programming these differences and
selling products and services to help the peoples of the world communicate
better. Once this kind of thing is widespread, it will truly contribute to
international understanding."
Logos is an international company (US, Canada and Europe) specialized in machine
translation for 25 years, which provides various translation tools, machine
translation systems and supporting services.
SYSTRAN (an acronym for System Translation) is a company specialized in machine
translation software. SYSTRAN's headquarters are located in
Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France. Sales and marketing, along with most
development, operate out of its subsidiary, in La Jolla, California. The SYSTRAN
site gives an interesting overview of the company's history. One of the
company's products is AltaVista Translation, an automatic translation service of
English Web pages into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, and vice
versa, and is available on the AltaVista site, the most frequently used search
engine on the Web.
Based in Montreal, Canada, Alis Technologies is an international company
specialized in the development and marketing of language handling solutions and
services, particularly at language implementation in the IT industry. Alis
Translation Solutions (ATS) offers a wide selection of applications and
languages, and multiple tools and services for best possible translation
quality. Language Technology Solutions (LTS) is devoted to commercializing
advanced tools and services in the field of language engineering and information
technology. The unilingual information systems are transformed into software
that users can put to work in their own language (90 languages covered).
Another machine translation development is SPANAM and ENGSPAN, which are fully
automatic machine translation systems developed and maintained by the
computational linguists, translators, and systems programmer of the Pan American
Health Organization (PAHO), Washington, D.C. The PAHO Translation Unit has used
SPANAM (Spanish to English) and ENGSPAN (English to Spanish) to process over 25
million words since 1980. Staff and free-lance translators postedit the raw
output to produce high-quality translations with a 30-50% gain in productivity.
The system is installed on a local area network at PAHO Headquarters and is used
regularly by staff in the technical and administrative units. The software is
also installed in a number of PAHO field offices and has been licensed to public
and non-profit institutions in the US, Latin America, and Spain.
Some associations also contribute to machine translation development.
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the main international
scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving
natural language and computation. Published by MIT Press, the ACL quarterly
journal, Computational Linguistics (ISSN 0891-2017), continues to be the primary
forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
The Finite String is its newsletter supplement. The European branch of ACL is
the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (EACL),
which provides a regional focus for its members.
The International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) heads a worldwide
network with three regional components: the Association for Machine Translation
in the Americas (AMTA), the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
and the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT).
The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) presents itself
as an association dedicated to anyone interested in the translation of languages
using computers in some way. It has members in Canada, Latin America, and the
United States. This includes people with translation needs, commercial system
developers, researchers, sponsors, and people studying, evaluating, and
understanding the science of machine translation and educating the public on
important scientific techniques and principles involved.
The European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) is based in Geneva,
Switzerland. This organization serves the growing community of people interested
in MT (machine translation) and translation tools, including users, developers,
and researchers of this increasingly viable technology.
The Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (AAMT), formerly called the
Japan Association for Machine Translation (created in 1991), is comprised of
three entities: researchers, manufacturers, and users of machine translation
systems. The association endeavors to develop machine translation technologies
to expand the scope of effective global communications and, for this purpose, is
engaged in machine translation system development, improvement, education, and
publicity.
In Web embraces language translation, an article of ZDNN (ZD Network News) of
July 21, 1998, Martha L. Stone explains: