Careful tuning of user-created dictionaries is indispensable when using a machine translation system for computer aided translation. However, there is no widely used standard for user dictionaries in the Japanese/English machine translation market. To address this issue, AAMT (the Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation) has established a specification of sharable dictionaries (UTX-S: Universal Terminology eXchange -- Simple), which can be used across different machine translation systems, thus increasing the interoperability of language resources. UTX-S is simpler than existing specifications such as UPF and OLIF. It was explicitly designed to make it easy to (a) add new user dictionaries and (b) share existing user dictionaries. This facilitates rapid user dictionary production and avoids vendor tie in. In this study we describe the UTX-Simple (UTX-S) format, and show that it can be converted to the user dictionary formats for five commercial English-Japanese MT systems. We then present a case study where we (a) convert an on-line glossary to UTX-S, and (b) produce user dictionaries for five different systems, and then exchange them. The results show that the simplified format of UTX-S can be used to rapidly build dictionaries. Further, we confirm that customized user dictionaries are effective across systems, although with a slight loss in quality: on average, user dictionaries improved the translations for 44.8% of translations with the systems they were built for and 37.3% of translations for different systems. In ongoing work, AAMT is using UTX-S as the format in building up a user community for producing, sharing, and accumulating user dictionaries in a sustainable way.

Pattern-based machine translation systems can be easily customized by adding new patterns. To gain full profits from this character, input of patterns should be both expressive and simple to understand. The pattern-based machine translation system we have developed simplifies the handling of features in patterns by allowing sharing constraints between non-terminal symbols, and implementing an automated scheme of feature inheritance between syntactic classes. To avoid conflicts inherent to the pattern-based approach the system has priority control between patterns and between dictionaries. This approach proved its scalability in the web-based collaborative translation environment ‘Yakushite Net.’

This paper describes an implementation of Collaborative Translation Environment ‘Yakushite Net’. In ‘Yakushite Net’, Internet users collaborate in enhancing the dictionaries of their specialty fields, and the system thus improves and expands its accuracy and areas of translations. In the course of realization of this system, we encountered several technical challenges. We would like to first explain those challenges, and then the solutions to them. Our future plan will also be explained at the end.

This paper describes a comprehensive translation environment build on the Internet. This environment is designed not only to translate web pages but also to support translation work on the web. We first introduce a basic idea and implementation of this environment and then compare it to conventional machine translation (MT) systems available on the web and translation memories.

This paper describes a new version of our machine translation system PENSÉE. In the light of its past systems, new PENSÉE is designed to improve portability from developers' point of view and translation quality from users' point of view. The features of new PENSÉE are: 1) Java implementation and 2) pattern-based transfer approach. In addition, new PENSÉE places a great importance on user interface especially in building user dictionaries. We will discuss why and how we resolve the existing MT problems and present dictionary building tools to support user customization.