By Roland Piquepaille
The European Union has now 25 members -- and 20 official languages, a nightmare for translators. Anticipating this, the EU started three years ago a 4-million euro project, TransType2, which is currently under test with results exceeding the original goals. In this article, the EU's Information Society Technologies (IST) reports productivity gains in excess of 30% above traditional methods. The system mixes the advantages of both computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT). When you use the computer-assisted system, you start your translation, and several suggestions are offered to you while you're typing, reducing your number of keystrokes and saving you time. Today, TransType2 allows bidirectional translations between English, French, German, and Spanish. Other European languages could easily been added. The EU is now thinking to bring this tool to us either as a commercial product or a Web service. Read more...Before going further, here are two screenshots illustrating the TransType2 concept (Credit: TransType2 project).
The first one comes from a page containing other screen captures while the second has been picked from this animated GIF image.
Now, let's look at the introduction of the IST Results article.
Due to end in February, the 36-month IST programme project has drawn on two of the most commonly used translation technologies developed to date: Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT), in which human translators work in unison with a computer; and Machine Translation (MT), in which the computer handles the entire process. While both techniques have advantages and drawbacks, TransType2 has
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