The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is proud to present the latest release of its fully automatic Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish machine translation systems. SPANAM and ENGSPAN have been ported to the 32-bit Windows platform. The bilingual graphical user interface provides easy access to all the features of the system. The translation engine can be accessed in three different ways: file translation from the desktop or word processing application, sentence translation from within the dictionary update module, or cut-and-paste translation using an ActiveX component. Any user can view all of PAHO's dictionary entries (words, expressions, and rules), and dictionary coders can add new entries of every type and modify all but a small number of protected records. The system is designed to be used by translation professionals in an institutional setting. Administrative utilities include job accounting, dictionary update log, terminology import and export, and dictionary merge. Users can view and print side-by-side listings of source and target texts, lists of not-found words, and the parse of any sentence.

This paper describes some of the features of the new 32-bit Windows version of PAHO’s English-Spanish (ENGSPAN®) and Spanish-English (SPANAM®) machine translation software. The new dictionary update interface is designed to help users add their own terminology to the lexicon and encourage them to write context-sensitive rules to improve the quality of the output. Expanded search capabilities provide instant access to related source and target entries, expressions, and rules. A live system demonstration will accompany this presentation.

This invited talk describes the use of fully automatic machine translation (FAMT) at the Pan American Health Organization. Statistics covering 1998 are presented and analyzed in terms of productivity and cost savings. Feedback from several outside users of PAHO's translation software is also reported. Problems encountered in implementing machine translation in an international organization are discussed from the points of view of managers, translators, and end users. The talk concludes with a quick glimpse at what PAHO's MT development staff has been working on this year.

A successful MT operation is the result of good planning, an incremental approach, dedicated and talented people, and MT software that is capable of handling the types of text to be translated. The presenter will share insights gained during 20 years of experience with the development and implementation of machine translation at the Pan American Health Organization and the experiences of users of several MT systems. Topics include: evaluating candidate systems, making a commitment, preparing the environment, training, choosing input texts, postediting, building the dictionaries, requesting program enhancements, monitoring progress, and justifying the investment. The MT software available today can increase your productivity if you are willing to put in some initial effort to learn the system and tailor it to your needs. Then MT will start working for you!