10 Future needs and developments

Despite the recent growth of systems for personal computers and of Internet services, it is still true to say that there is nothing yet really suitable for the independent professional translator, i.e. for those not working for large companies or in translation organizations. It is known that some translators have tried to apply commercial PC-based software to their needs, but the amount of adaptation required and the generally poor output has made them unsatisfactory and uneconomic. More suitable for the independent translator would be a cost-effective translation workstation. However, current workstations on the market are still too expensive for the individual translator. Although there is promise of low-cost computer tools for this potentially large market – e.g. terminology and concordancing software, and perhaps alignment software – there is no doubt that this segment is not being covered as well as many other areas.

Another area at present poorly served is the need for reliable but low-cost translation of documents into unknown foreign languages where users do not want to engage expert bilingual translators. There is no problem with translation into recipients’ own languages – PC systems can give adequate ‘rough’ versions for users to get some idea of the basic message – but for translation into an unknown language there are still no solutions. There have been recently some cheap Japanese products which serve this specific ‘foreign language authoring’ demand in the case of writing business letters (based on standard phrases and document templates), but for other areas and for longer documents, where there is less ‘stereotyping’, there is nothing as yet. For translation into another language unknown (or poorly known) by the sender, what is really required is software which can be relied upon to provide good quality output (and most PC products are not good enough). A number of research groups are investigating interactive systems, where the sender composes an MT-friendly version of a letter or document in collaboration with the computer. With a sufficiently ‘normalised’ input text, the MT system can guarantee grammatically and stylistically correct output. As yet, however, this work (e.g. at GETA in France) is still at the laboratory stage.

The same is true for software combining MT with information access, information extraction, and summarisation software. There are no commercial systems yet on the market; developments are still at the research stages. The potential and the demand has been recognised: for example, in recent years, most research funds of the European Union have been focused not on MT or ‘pure’ natural language processing (as it was during the 1980s), but on projects for multilingual tools with direct applications in mind; many involve translation of some kind, usually within a restricted subject field and often in controlled conditions. As just one example, the AVENTINUS project is developing a system for police forces in the area of drug control and law enforcement: information about drugs, criminals and suspects will be available on databases accessible in any of the European Union languages.

There is growing interest in such multilingual applications worldwide. The application that has received most attention has been ‘cross-language information retrieval’, i.e. software enabling users to search foreign language databases in their own languages. As yet most work has focussed on the construction and operation of appropriate translation dictionaries, for the matching of query words against words or phrases in document databases – although the provision of software for fast translation of original texts into the enquirer’s own language is naturally also envisaged. Clearly it will not be long before commercial software is available for this application.

The future application that is probably most desired by the general public is the translation of spoken language. But, from a commercial (and even research) perspective, the prospects for automatic speech translation are still distant. It was only in the 1980s that developments in speech recognition and synthesis made spoken language translation a feasible objective. In Japan a joint government and industry company ATR was established in 1986 near Osaka, and it is now one of the main centres for automatic speech translation. The aim is to develop a speaker-independent real-time telephone translation system for Japanese to English and vice versa, initially for hotel reservation and conference registration transactions. Other speech translation projects have been set up subsequently. The JANUS system is a research project at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Karlsruhe in Germany. The researchers are collaborating with ATR in a consortium (C-STAR), each developing speech recognition and synthesis modules for their own languages (English, German, Japanese). (One by-product of this research was mentioned earlier: the rapid-deployment project for custom-built systems in less-common languages.) The fourth major effort in speech translation is the long-term VERBMOBIL project funded by the German Ministry for Research and Technology which began in May 1993. The aim is a portable aid for business negotiations as a supplement to users’ own knowledge of the languages (German, Japanese, English). Numerous German university groups are involved in fundamental research on dialogue linguistics, speech recognition and MT design; a prototype is nearing completion, and a demonstration product is targeted for early in the next century.

Speech translation is probably at present the most innovative area of computer-based translation research, and it is attracting most funding and the most publicity. However, few experienced observers expect dramatic developments in this area in the near future – the development of MT for written language has taken many years to reach the present stage of widespread practical use in multinational companies, a wide range of PC based products of variable quality and application, growing use on networks and for electronic mail. Despite today’s high profile for written-language MT, researchers know that there is still much to be done to improve quality. Spoken-language MT has not yet reached even the stage of real-time testing in non-laboratory settings.