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| "paper_id": "1981", |
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| "title": "PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION V. Lawson (ed.) v North-Holland Publishing Company / \u00a9 ASLIB, 1982", |
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| "text": "\"Why did we buy a machine translation system? Well, I expect management thought if it's computer-based, it must work!\" The irreverent suspicion of a posteditor at this conference contrasts with the realism of a computer specialist( 1 ) : \"If anyone says you just feed your stuff into a computer, press a button and get out what you want, don't believe him\"; and, equally pertinent here, \"You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.\" Yet both were committed to the use of computers.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION Veronica Lawson", |
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| "text": "Translation by computer is now a reality, with perhaps 20 machine translation (MT) systems in regular practical use around the world. How good is it? What are its limitations? Above all, what it is like to work with? These were the questions which this conference sought to answer. With this emphasis on MT in practice rather than theory, it was the first international event to concentrate on the people who work with the \"practical\" (as opposed to research) MT systems.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION Veronica Lawson", |
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| "text": "The themes were handled in four sessions. TRANSLATION IN TRANSITION set the scene and introduced two of the systems (Meteo, successfully used since 1977, and Weidner, relatively cheap and sold as a machine aid). A more searching look at ASPECTS OF EDITING used Systran as an example, while also including more general papers on ergonomics and costs. The core session was a discussion on THE POSTEDITORS' EXPERIENCE by 7 editors, with 5 brief but meaty papers. Finally, in marked contrast, an academic look at what MT is not likely to do, and so at where future research and marketing should be directed: SPECULATION: THE LIMITS OF INNOVATION.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION Veronica Lawson", |
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| "text": "Seventeen papers are too many to list here, and their overall standard is too high for me to pick out a few. Instead, abstracts are supplied.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION Veronica Lawson", |
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| "text": "The table overleaf( 2 ), however, may help readers to appreciate the differences (and on occasion disagreements) between the various approaches. At first sight the 6 user organisations may have had 3 machine translation systems -Meteo, Weidner and Systran -but these become 6 if, knowing the great size and power of the MT dictionaries, we regard each Systran setup as a separate entity (and far more than 6 if we choose to count every language pair). And the conference also considered Eurotra, the detailed technical specifications for a system some years in the future. Further details of all the systems, of course, will be found in the papers and discussion reports. The Commission of the European Communities differs from the other users represented in that it bought MT not for immediate use but for development. The \"Commission heavy mob\" (their epithet) therefore apologised for their relative inexperience in postediting. However, the Commission is the only MT user in my experience to demand high quality MT of such a variety of natural-language texts (administrative, political, scientific, technical, both for publication and for internal use), and as a result it has initiated many improvements. A current Commission study (3) , in fact, concerns two of the recurrent themes of the conference: how little we know about what posteditors actually do, and how MT quality depends on the type of text translated. The Commission is also responsible for much of the recent change in attitudes to and of translators (4), of which this conference is a sign.", |
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| "text": "(3)", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION Veronica Lawson", |
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| "text": "The conference originated over two years before in my recommendation for an MT workshop at the triennial congress of the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) in Warsaw in May 1981. Ian Pigott had suggested that for once we seek out translator/posteditors rather than only systems experts and theorists. Ultimately FIT, with the difficulties in Poland, had no papers by posteditors (though it did, for the first time, include MT in the opening session for technical translators). But meanwhile the time had ripened, and the Translators' Guild floated the idea again, this time rapidly producing results: 200 people from 18 countries.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION Veronica Lawson", |
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| "text": "The user's main objectives as stated at the conference ranged from \"intelligibility\" (US Air Force) through \"acceptability, speed, volume\" (Xerox) to \"perfection, or at least accuracy\". As usual, it is a question of \"horses for courses\", a specific translation type for a specific purpose. Such considerations are not new, but they are perhaps examined more carefully now than before. In p a r t i c u l a r , the \"information translation\", that Cinderella of translation, is beginning to be taken seriously. She will never be princess, but she may be promoted to ugly sister. This debate on the meaning of words like \"translation\" and \"acceptable\" will be with us for some time, as is only proper. It might be over sooner, however, If the term \"machine translation\", which invites comparison with human translation, were dropped in favour of \"machine pre-translation\"", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION vii", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "Another problem in MT, as in some other fields, is that some systems actually used are not in the literature. Research systems are much written about, partly in order to get funds for more research Working systems are not, whether because of the need to protect trade secrets or simply the fact that people are too busy getting the systems on the road and keeping them there. Little has been written on Meteo since it started working in 1977, there is little on Systran, and virtually nothing on Weidner, which was left out of one table of existing systems on the grounds that too little was known about it.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION vii", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "Systems which have never been used in the \"real world\", on the other hand, are well represented in the literature. Part of the point of this conference was to redress the balance.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION vii", |
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| "text": "We would not, after all, want a repeat of the mid-60's credibility gap between the confidence of the researchers and the disbelief of the public. Then there were no users to speak of, and the US government's ALPAC report could consign machine translation to limbo. This time, as Yorick Wilks noted in his closing remarks, MT has reached a kind of maturity. Enough systems have now been in extended practical use for the participants at MT conferences to have changed from casual academics to people in suits.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION vii", |
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| "text": "On behalf of the steering committee I would like to thank all those who contributed to the conference, particularly the speakers and chairmen, the Commission of the European Communities (for their generous sponsorship) and, not least, the very active audience. On behalf of the Translators' Guild, moreover, I would like to acknowledge a special debt to Aslib, above all for the organisational skill which since 1978 has turned one event on Translating and the Computer (5) into a series.", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION vii", |
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| "text": "The fourth conference in that series will be on term banks, in the autumn of 1982. The fifth will then return to machine translation at the end of 1983, on the very eve of Orwell's fateful year. His Newspeak was designed to trap man's mind in a straight jacket, precisely by robbing him of freedom in the use of language, his greatest t o o l . Our concern then, to judge by the determined humanism of the speakers at this 1981 conference, will more than ever be to uphold that freedom and to mould the computer -that new tool -to serve our human needs .", |
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| "section": "acknowledgement", |
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| "text": "(2) Suggested by Dr Francesco Rossi.(3) Lawson, V. Interim Report on EEC study contract TH-47 (Methodology study on text typology, typology of machine translation errors and ergonomic analysis) (Commission of the European Communities, Luxembourg, 1981).(4) See Machine translation and people, elsewhere in this volume.(5) Snell, B.M. (ed.) Proceedings of Aslib seminar Translating and the computer (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1979).", |
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| "title": "Microcomputer technology -Its impact on authors and publishers (Society of Authors seminar", |
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| "first": "Gabriel", |
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| "raw_text": "Gabriel Baum at: Microcomputer technology -Its impact on authors and publishers (Society of Authors seminar, 26 November 1980).", |
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