The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in Washington, D.C. has developed its own machine translation software, as a common work from its own computational linguists, translators, and system programmers. The PAHO Translation Unit has used SPANAM (Spanish to English) from 1980 and ENGSPAN (English to Spanish) from 1985, to process over 25 million words between 1980 and 1998. Staff translators and free-lance translators post-edit the raw output to produce high-quality translations with a 30-50% gain in productivity. The software is available in the LAN (Local Area Network) of PAHO Headquarters, and is regularly used by the staff of technical and administrative units. The software is also available in a number of PAHO field offices, and has been licensed to public and non-profit institutions in the U.S., Latin America, and Spain. The software was later renamed PAHOMTS, and has included new language pairs with Portuguese.
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# Comments from ZDNN
In "Web Embraces Language Translation", an article published in ZDNN (ZDNetwork News) on 21 July 1998, Martha Stone explained: "Among the new products in the $10 billion language translation business are instant translators for websites, chat rooms, email and corporate intranets. The leading translation firms are mobilizing to seize the opportunities. Such as:
*SYSTRAN has partnered with AltaVista and reports between 500,000 and 600,000 visitors a day on babelfish.altavista.digital.com, and about 1 million translations per day — ranging from recipes to complete webpages. About 15,000 sites link to babelfish, which can translate to and from French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese. The site plans to add Japanese soon. 'The popularity is simple. With the internet, now there is a way to use U.S. content. All of these contribute to this increasing demand,' said Dimitros Sabatakakis, group CEO of SYSTRAN, speaking from his Paris home.
*Alis technology powers the Los Angeles Times' soon-to-be launched language translation feature on its site. Translations will be available in Spanish and French, and eventually, Japanese. At the click of a mouse, an entire webpage can be translated into the desired language.
*Globalink offers a variety of software and web translation possibilities, including a free email service and software to enable text in chat rooms to be translated.
But while these so-called 'machine' translations are gaining worldwide popularity, company execs admit they're not for every situation. Representatives from Globalink, Alis and SYSTRAN use such phrases as 'not perfect' and 'approximate' when describing the quality of translations, with the caveat that sentences submitted for translation should be simple, grammatically accurate and idiom-free. 'The progress on machine translation is moving at Moore's Law — every 18 months it's twice as good,' said Vin Crosbie, a web industry analyst in Greenwich, Conn. 'It's not perfect, but some [non-English speaking] people don't realize I'm using translation software.'
With these translations, syntax and word usage suffer, because dictionary-driven databases can't decipher between homonyms — for example, 'light' (as in the sun or light bulb) and 'light' (the opposite of heavy). Still, human translation would cost between $50 and $60 per webpage, or about 20 cents per word, SYSTRAN's Sabatakakis said. While this may be appropriate for static 'corporate information' pages, the machine translations are free on the web, and often less than $100 for software, depending on the number of translated languages and special features."
# Comments from RALI