Creating a term base to customise an MT system: reusability of resources and tools from the translator’s point of view

This paper addresses the issue of combining existing tools and resources to customise dictionaries used for machine translation (MT) with a view to providing technical translators with an effective tim-saving tool. It is based on the hypothesis that customising MT systems can be achieved using unsophisticated tools, so that the system can produce output of sufficient quality for post-translation proofreading. Corpora collected for a different purpose, together with existing on-line glossaries, can be reused or reapplied to build a bigger term base. The Systran customisable on-line MT system (Systranet) is tested on technical documents (the Linux operating system HOWTOs), without any specialised dictionary. Customised dictionaries, existing glossaries completed by adding corpus-based information using terminology extraction tools, are then incorporated into the system and an improved translation is produced. The dictionary will be augmented and corrected as long as modifications generate significant results. This process will be described in detail. The resulting translation is good enough to warrant proofreading in the normal way. This last point is important because MT results require specialised editing procedures. Compared with the time taken to produce a translation manually, this methodology should prove useful for professional translators. 1