Hi Christian, Similar comments were submitted by a number of us after a blog on MT in the online FT about 6 weeks ago. On one of the projects I reported on with Rudolf Meier of Siemens (EAMT-05, Budapest) we also had users requesting MT over human translation (very restricted domain, highly specialised terminology). Regards, Terence Lewis
On Monday 23 February 2009 11:18:04 Christian Boitet wrote: > Hi, 23/2/09 > > At 20:27 -0500 22/02/09, Job M. van Zuijlen wrote: > >I'm wondering: what's exactly the purpose of this discussion? > > > >Job van Zuijlen > > F.Kovacs is simply spamming MT-list with his "MT-hater" e-mails, > - disseminating false examples of MT added to a Jews-hater picture, > which is not only bad taste, but ethically very incorrect, > - and not reading anything he gets in answer -- or so blinded by his > prejudices he can't listen to reason and goes on an on. > > His last e-mail is so beyond the point I prefer to stop trying to let > him understand that MT is a tool and does not compete with human > translators. > > > > What follows is more for our MT community -- arguments against MT > bashing may come in handy in some situations like this one. > > I might give examples such as METEO, where professional translators > (from the Bureau of Translation) actually begged TAUM to produce an > MT system to relieve them of that "purgatory" -- then the system > actually replaced the junior translators producing the first drafts, > and the post-edition time (by seniors) was divided by 6 or 7. Since > more than 30 years now, that system (first TAUM-meteo, written in > Q-systems, then METEO, written in GramR) has regularly translated 30 > M words/year (20 E-F, 10 F-E), and has saved the equivalent of 17 > translators -- simply assigned to more interesting tasks than to > translate a bulletin which will be obsolete less than 4 hours later). > > Or the METAL system (first developed through a contract of Siemens to > Slocum's team at Austin in 1981): > - already in 1984, after a few months of use (G-E), postedition time > went down to 10-15 min/page. > - in 2005 (EAMT-05, Budapest), Comprendium reported the actual use of > a version of METAL (grammars, dictionaires, of course) > Spanish-Catalan and Spanish Galician, to translate newspapers > everyday, with a post-edition time of 5 min/page, compared to 1 hour > for purely human work (measured before the system was put to use) and > 30 mn for humans working with a translation memory (my estimation for > this last figure). METAL is now owned by LucySoftware and used for > these and other applications. > > Well, I hope that what I wrote in answer to these e-mails can > convince young translators that there are MT systems which can really > help them, and, even more, that MT systems can be developed or tuned > with their particular data (lexicons, translation memories), to help > them more. > Or: what is important for humans is the usefulness of MT for the task > *they* have to or want to perform. > > 2 simple mottos: > > - there can be and are (linguistically) very good MT systems, better > than human translators in the sense that professional revision is > possible and takes less time, but ONLY for applications on restricted > tasks/sublanguages, such as Nikkei flash reports (ALTFLASH) or > weather bulletins (METEO) or identified technical typologies/domains > (METAL) or on very similar languages. > > - there are a lot of (linguistically) bad or even very bad MT systems, > BUT no MT output is bad enough not to be used with profit by real > bilinguals to augment their productivity -- more than by using a > translation memory if less than 20% exact matches and 40% fuzzy > matches can be found. > > Best regards to the MT community, > > Ch.Boitet _______________________________________________ Mt-list mailing list
