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<Paper uid="A83-1029">
  <Title>COMPUTER-ASSISTED TRANSLATION SYSTEMS: The Standard Design and A Multi-level Design</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
WHY TRANSLATORS DO NOT LIKE IT:
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Because they feel that they are tools of the system instead of artists using a tool.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
WHY SPONSORS DO NOT LIKE IT:
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Because the system has to be worked on for a lonQ time and be almost perfect before it can be determined whether or not any useful result will be obtained.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
II AN ALTERNATIVE DESIGN
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> There has been for some time a real alternative to the standard design -- namely, translator aids. These translator aids have been principally terminology aids of various kinds and some use of standard word processing. These aids have been found to be clearly useful. However, they have not attracted the attention of computational linguists because they do not involve any really interesting or challengina linguistic processing. This is not to say that they are I &amp;quot;T&amp; trivial. It is, in fact, quite difficult to perfect a reliable, user-frlendly word processor or a secure, easy to use automated dictionary. But the challenge is more in the area of computer science and engineering than in computational linguistics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Until now, there has not been much real integration of work in machine translation and translator aids. This paper is a proposal for a system design which allows Just such an integration. The proposed system consists of two pieces of hardware: (1) a translator work station (probably a single-user micro-computer) and (2) a &amp;quot;selective&amp;quot; machine translation system (probably running on a mainframe). The translator work station is a three-level system of aids.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> All three levels look much the same to the translater. At each level, the translator works at a keyboard and video display. The display is divided into two major windows. The bottom window contains the current segment of translated text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> It is a work area, and nothing goes in it except what the translator puts there. The upper window contains various aids such as dictionary entries segments of source text, or suggested translation~ To the translator, the difference between the various levels is simply the nature of the aids that appear in the upper window; and the translator in all cases produces the translation a segment at a time in the lower window. Internally, however, the three levels are vastly different. null Level 1 is the lowest level of aid to the translator. At this level, there is no need for data ent~ of the source text. The translator can sit down with a source text on paper and begin translating immediately. The system at this level includes word processing of the target text, access to a terminology file, and access to an expansion code file to speed up use of connmnly encountered terms.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Level 2 is an intermediate level at which the source text must be available in machine readable form. It can be entered remotely and supplied to the translator (e.g. on a diskette) or it can be entered at the translator work station.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Level 2 provides all the aids available at level l and two additional aids -deg (a) preprocessing of the source text to search for unusual or misspelled terms, etc., and (b) dynamic processing of the source text as it is translated. The translator sees in the upper window the current segment of text to be translated and suggested translations of selected words and phrases found by automatically identifying the words of the current segment of source text and looking them up in the bilingual dictionary that can be accessed manually in level I.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Level 3 requires a separate machine translation system and an interface to it. Instead of supplying just the source text to the translator work station, the work station receives (on diskette or through a network) the source text and (for each segment of source text) either a machine  translation of the segment or an indication of the reason for failure of the machine translation system on that segment. This explains the notion of &amp;quot;selective&amp;quot; machine translation referred to previously. A selective machine translation system does not attempt to translate even segment of text. It contains a formal model of language which may or may not accept a given segment of source text. If a given segment fails in analysis, transfer, or generation, a reason is given. If no failure occurs, a machine translation of that segment is produced and a problem record is attached to the segment indicating difflculties encountered, such as arbitrary choices made.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Level 3 provides to the translator all the aids of levels l &amp; Z. In addition, the translator has the option of specifying a maximum acceptable problem level. When a segment of source text is displayed, if the machine translation of that segment has a problem level which is low enough, the machine translation of that segment will be displayed below the source text instead of the level Z suggestions. The translator can examine the machine translation of a given segment and, if it is Judged to be good enough by the translator, the translator can pull it down into the bottom window with a single keystroke and revise it as needed. Note that writing a selective machine translation system need not mean starting from scratch. It should be possible to take any exist-Ing machine translation system and modify it to be a selective translation system. Note that the translator work station can provide valuable feed-back to the machine translation development team by recording which segments of machine translation ~re seen by the translator and whether they were used and if so how revised.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> The standard design for a machine translation system and the alternative mul ti-level design just described use essentially the same components. They both involve data entry of the source text (although the data entry is needed only at levels 2 and 3 in the multi-level design). They both involve machine translation (although the machine translation is needed only at level 3 in the multi-level design). And they both involve interaction with a human translator. In the standard design, this interaction consists of human revision of the raw machine translation. In the multi-level design, this interaction consists of human translation in which the human uses word processing, terminology lookup, and suggested translations from the computer. At one extreme (level l), the multi-level system involves no machine translation at all, and the system is little more than an integrated word processor and terminology file.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> At the other extreme (level 3), the multi-level system could act much the same as the standard design. If eve.e.ve~.~.sentence of the source text received a machine translation with a hiqh quality estimate, then the translation could conceivably be produced by the translator choosing to pull each segment of translated text into the translation work area and revise it as needed. The difference between the two designs becomes apparent only when the raw machine translation is not almost perfect. In that case, which is of course common, the multi-level system continues to produce translations with the human translator translating more segments using level l and level 2 aids instead of level ~ aids; the translation process continues with some loss of speed but no major difficulty. When the same raw machine translation is placed in a standard design context, the translator is expected to revise it in spite of the problems, and according to the author's experience, the translators tend to become frustrated and unhappy with their work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Both designs use the same components but put them together differently. See Figure I.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Here is a summary of the arguments for a multi-level design:</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
WHY COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTS LIKE IT:
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Because they can set up a &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; formal model and keep it clean, because there is no pressure to produce a translation for every sentence that goes in.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="8" start_page="0" end_page="176" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
WHY TRANSLATORS LIKE IT:
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Because the system is truly a tool for the translator. The translator is never pressured to  revise the machine output. Of course, if the raw machine translation of a sentence is very good and needs only a minor change or two, the translator will naturally pull it down and revise it because that is so much faster and easier than translating from scratch.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="9" start_page="176" end_page="176" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
WHY SPONSORS LIKE IT:
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Because the system is useful after a modest investment in level I. Then level 2 is added and the system becomes more useful. While the system is being used at levels l and 2, level 3 is developed and the machine translation system becomes a useful component of the multi-level system when only a small fraction of the source sentences receive a good machine translation. Thus, there is a measurable result obtained from each increment of investment.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> WEAVER, WARREN. IgSS. Translation. Machine Translation of Languages, ed. by W. N. Locke and A. 0. Booth, 15-23. New York: Wiley Ill IMPLEMENTATION EXPERIENCE AND PLANS The multi-level design grew out of a Naval Research Laboratory workshop the summer of IgBl, a paper on translator aids by Martin Kay (Ig80)~ and user reaction to a translator aid system (called a &amp;quot;Suggestion Box&amp;quot; aid) was tested on a seminar of translators fall 1981. The current implementation is on a Z-80 based micro-computer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The next implementation will be on a 16-bit micro-cnmputer with foreign language display capabllities.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The author is now looking for a research machine translation system to use in level 3, e.g. ARI~E-78 (See Boitet 1982). Further papers will discuss the successes and disappointments of a multi-level translation system.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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