subject: Mt And The Internet [print this page] The impact of the Internet has been significant in recent years. We are already seeing an accelerating growth of real-time on-line translation on the Internet itself. In recent years, we have seen many systems designed specifically for the translation of Web pages and of electronic mail. The demand for immediate translations will surely continue to grow rapidly, but at the same time users are also going to want better results. There is clearly an urgent need for translation systems developed specifically to deal with the kind of colloquial messages found on the Internet. The old linguistics rule-based approaches are probably not equal to the task on their own, and corpus based methods making use of the voluminous data available on the Internet itself are obviously appropriate. But as yet there has been little research on such systems.
At the same time as we are seeing this growing demand for crummy translations (Church and Hovy 1993), the Internet is also providing the means for more rapid delivery of quality translation to individuals and to small companies. A number of MT system vendors are already offering translation services, usually adding value by human post-editing. More will surely appear as the years go by. It is probable that the very existence of low quality MT output from Internet systems and from commercial software will create a demand for good translations from people who have had no previous access to translation facilities.
However, the Internet is having further profound impacts that will surely change the future prospects for MT. There are predictions that the stand-alone PC with its array of software for word-processing, databases, games, etc. will be replaced by Network Computers which would download systems and programs from the Internet as and when required. In this scenario, the one-off purchase of individually packaged MT software, dictionaries, etc. would be replaced by remote stores of MT programs, dictionaries, grammars, translation archives, specialized glossaries, etc. which would presumably be paid for according to usage. Needless to say, such a change would have profound effect on the way in which MT systems are developed and marketed. What is perhaps more likely to happen is that on-demand downloading of MT software will not completely replace retail sales of individual software packages, but will introduce a further expansion of the market just as cheap PC translation software has not replaced older more substantial products but expanded the range of potential purchasers and users of MT systems.
Another profound impact of the Internet will concern the nature of the software itself. What users of Internet services are seeking is information in whatever language it may have been written or stored translation is just one means to that end. Users will want a seamless integration of information retrieval, extraction and summarization systems with translation. As this conference has demonstrated, research has begun in such areas as cross-lingual information retrieval, multilingual summarization, and so forth, and before many years there will be systems available on the market and the Internet.
In fact, it is probable that in future years there will be fewer pure MT systems and many more computer-based tools and applications where automatic translation is just one component. As a first step, it will surely not be long before all word-processing software includes translation as an in-built option Integrated language software will be the norm not only for the multinational companies but also available and accessible for anyone from their own computer and from any device interfacing with computer networks. Again, it will not spell the end of the pure MT system completely, but be a demand-led expansion of the provision of translation software in some accessible and usable form for the future information society.
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