Machine Translation - Applications

Applications

There are now many software programs for translating natural language, several of them online, such as:

• Ackuna, a free crowdsource translation site that utilizes a community of bilingual speakers instead of machine translation.
• Anusaaraka, a free open source machine translation from English to Hindi based on Panini grammar and uses state of the art NLP tools. Can be used online and downloaded from
• Joldee, a free online machine translation from English to Bengali. Can be accessed online at http://www.joldee.com
• Apertium, a free and open source machine translation platform (WinXLator gives this a Windows GUI)
• Omnifluent, Hybrid Machine Translation and Automatic Speech Recognition from SAIC.
• Asia Online, provides a custom machine translation engine building capability that they claim gives near-human quality compared to the "gist" based quality of free online engines. Asia Online also provides tools to edit and create custom machine translation engines with their Language Studio suite of products.
• Bing Translator, a free online translator from Microsoft.
• Cunei, an open-source platform for data-driven machine translation released under the MIT license. Platform-independent Java code with both a command-line and graphical interface.
• DocTranslator, a web service which uses the Google Translate API to automatically translate and return Office document files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) while preserving the original document layouts.
• English to Punjabi Translation, Web based English to Punjabi Machine Translation System.
• Google Translate, a free online translator from Google.
• Google Translator Toolkit, a web service designed to allow translators to edit the translations that Google Translate automatically generates. With the Google Translator Toolkit, translators can organize their work and use shared translations, glossaries and translation memories.
• TranslationSoftware4u, award winning translation software from Systran, the most popular translation software worldwide used by most professional translators.
• Hindi to Punjabi Machine Translation System, provides machine translation using a direct approach. It translates Hindi into Punjabi. It also features writing e-mail in the Hindi language and sending the same in Punjabi to the recipient.
• Punjabi to Hindi Machine Translation System, provides machine translation using a direct approach. It translates Punjabi to Hindi. It also features converting any website in Punjabi to Hindi on the fly. The Punjabi Website must be in Unicode.
• IdiomaX, which powers online translation services at idiomax.com
• localization tools, such and Alchemy Catalyst and Multilizer.
• iTranslate4, an MT-aggregation platform including an API, supported by the major European MT providers such as SYSTRAN, PROMT, Linguatec, PWN MorphoLogic, SkyCode, Amebis, Sunda, and others. The platform allows translation from 46 languages and is open to new MT-providers.
• Jibbigo, sells a bidirectional, offline, speech-to-speech translation app for Apple's App Store and the Android Market.
• LetsMT! Cloud-based platform for generation of custom MT engines from user provided data. Powered by Moses.
• LinguaSys, provides highly customized hybrid machine translation that can go from any language to any language.
• Lucy Software, translates in several European languages.
• Moses, a free software statistical machine translation engine released under the LGPL license for Windows and Linux.
• NeuroTran, a software translator that translates books, web pages, documents, e-mails, faxes, memos, manuals, reports, spreadsheets, correspondence, letters and more to and from many languages. For Windows and Macintosh.
• Power Translator
• PROMT, which powers online translation services at Voila.fr and Orange.fr
• SDL BeGlobal and SDL Language Weaver which power FreeTranslation.com (website)
• SiShiTra, a hybrid machine translation engine for Spanish-Catalan translation.
• SYSTRAN, which powers Yahoo! Babel Fish
• Ta with you, a specialized in customized machine translation solutions in any language. Their web-based user interface makes it easy for any Language Service Provider to generate any combination of domain and language pair to achieve the best quality. Their solution works with almost human quality for a wide variety of language pairs.
• Tilde Translator, free online translator for Latvian language. Provides also free apps for Android and iOS.
• Toggletext uses a transfer-based system (known as Kataku) to translate between English and Indonesian.
• Traduwiki, cloud-based translation tool harnessing the knowledge of bilingual and language-aware communities. The platform provides some interesting tools as segment annotations for group collaboration.
• Translate and Back, a free online round-trip machine translation tool, which enables checking correctness by back translation. Contains virtual keyboards and human voice. Suitable for right to left languages, as well.
• Translation Cloud API, An API available for developers and programmers which utilizes proprietary crowdsource technology to produce accurate hybrid translations for use in applications.
• Yandex, translates between English and Russian and Ukrainian.
• WebTrance, is a rule-based interlingua MT system with statistical component. It allows translation between English, Bulgarian, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Turkish.
• Worldlingo provides machine translation using both statistical based TE's and rule based TE's. Most recognizable as the MT partner in Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Mac Office.
• Yahoo! Babel Fish, powered by SYSTRAN
• NiuTrans,a free software statistical machine translation engine released under the LGPL license for Windows and Linux,developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at Northeastern University, China.

A number of translation software programs are available free of charge, e.g. ForeignDesk, the multiplatform Okapi Framework, GTS Website Translator and OmegaT+].

While no system provides the holy grail of fully automatic high-quality machine translation of unrestricted text, many fully automated systems produce reasonable output. The quality of machine translation is substantially improved if the domain is restricted and controlled.

Despite their inherent limitations, MT programs are used around the world. Probably the largest institutional user is the European Commission. The MOLTO project, for example, coordinated by the University of Gothenburg, received more than 2.375 million euros project support from the EU to create a reliable translation tool that covers a majority of the EU languages.

Google has claimed that promising results were obtained using a proprietary statistical machine translation engine. The statistical translation engine used in the Google language tools for Arabic <-> English and Chinese <-> English had an overall score of 0.4281 over the runner-up IBM's BLEU-4 score of 0.3954 (Summer 2006) in tests conducted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology.

With the recent focus on terrorism, the military sources in the United States have been investing significant amounts of money in natural language engineering. In-Q-Tel (a venture capital fund, largely funded by the US Intelligence Community, to stimulate new technologies through private sector entrepreneurs) brought up companies like Language Weaver. Currently the military community is interested in translation and processing of languages like Arabic, Pashto, and Dari. The Information Processing Technology Office in DARPA hosts programs like TIDES and Babylon Translator. US Air Force has awarded a $1 million contract to develop a language translation technology.

The notable rise of social networking on the web in recent years has created yet another niche for the application of machine translation software – in utilities such as Facebook, or instant messaging clients such as Skype, GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger, etc. – allowing users speaking different languages to communicate with each other. Machine translation applications have also been released for most mobile devices, including mobile telephones, pocket PCs, PDAs, etc. Due to their portability, such instruments have come to be designated as mobile translation tools enabling mobile business networking between partners speaking different languages, or facilitating both foreign language learning and unaccompanied traveling to foreign countries without the need of the intermediation of a human translator.