<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P04-3001">
  <Title>TransType2 - An Innovative Computer-Assisted Translation System</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="1" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Paragraph position="2"> is an innovative tool for speeding up and facilitating the work of translators by automatically suggesting translation completions. The system uses probabilistic translation and language models to calculate completions that are compatible with translator's input and, furthermore, revises its suggestions in real time with each new character the translator enters. If the system provides a correct suggestion, the translator has only to accept it, thereby saving time in producing the target text. Otherwise, the translator ignores the system's suggestions and continues to type his or her intended translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> TT2 is based on a new Machine Assisted Translation paradigm that sits between fully automatic MT and translation memory in order to significantly increase translator productivity on non-repetitive texts. TT2 is unique in the way in which it combines the strengths of MT technology with the competence of the human translator.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The project is an extension of the TransType project that was developed from 1997 to 2000 by the RALI at Universite de Montreal (Foster 1997, Langlais 2002), which demonstrated the interest of target text mediated computer aided translation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5">  For further details, see http://tt2.sema.es Different versions of the system are being developed for English, French, Spanish and German (with English as the pivot). To ensure that TT2 corresponds to translators' needs, two professional translation agencies are currently evaluating successive prototypes. To date, translation technology has not been able to keep pace with the demand for high-quality translation. TT2 has the ability to significantly increase translator productivity and thus has enormous commercial potential.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> TT2 is a RTD project funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme and includes five European partners: Atos Origin (Spain): administrative and technical coordinator, system design and integration.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Lehrstuhl fur Informatik VI, Computer Science Department, RWTH Aachen - University of Technology (Germany): statistical translation, speech recognition.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Instituto Tecnologico de Informatica, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, (Spain): finite-state techniques for translation and speech recognition.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble (France): corpus provider and statistical translation modeling.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Celer Soluciones, Madrid (Spain): evaluation in the operational context of a translation bureau. And two Canadian partners: RALI Laboratory, University of Montreal (Canada): user-interface, statistical modeling, evaluation coordination.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Societe Gamma, Ottawa (Canada): evaluation in the operational context of a translation bureau. Figure 1. User-view of TT2 with the source text on the left highlighting the sentence under translation. The translator types in the right pane in which TT2 suggests completions that appear in the menu in real-time. Completions can be accepted either by clicking an item from the menu or by the keyboard. This picture displays in red (appearing in gray in black and white) characters that have been suggested and accepted by the translator.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> 2 TT2 as seen by a translator TransType is a tool that observes a translator as he or she is typing, tries to predict what will be typed next and displays its predictions to the user. The translator can incorporate these suggestions into the current target text if they are useful, or simply ignore them by continuing typing. The system will then adapt itself to the new text typed by the translator. The suggestions can potentially improve a translator's productivity both by speeding up the keying in of the target text and by contributing to the translation process itself. If the underlying machine translation technology is good enough, TransType2's contributions may reduce the need to consult conventional tools such as a bilingual dictionary, term bank, or translation memory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> The user interface (Figure 1) allows a real-time interaction with the output of the translation/language model to help a translator produce a translation. TransType2's main window is divided into two panes, one containing the source text and another containing the target text. The panes are displayed side by side, with their contents divided into aligned segments. They are also synchronized, so that scrolling one moves the other in parallel. Many aspects of the main window's behavior and appearance, such as the orientation of the source and target panes, can be changed using the commands accessible from the menu or keyboard shortcuts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> The source pane is read-only in which the only operation allowed is the selection of a new sentence that triggers a new translation in the target window. The target window is a normal text editing window, except that after each character typed by the user, the system displays a pop-up menu of suggestions for completing the current input. If the user types a return or a tab, this suggestion is inserted in the text. Suggestions can be scrolled up or down with arrow keys or selected with the mouse. At initialization time, the user selects the prediction engine to be used according to one of six source-to-target translation pairs and one of the following domains: technical manuals, European Community official documents and official reports of the debates of the House of Commons of Canada (Hansards).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>