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PlainTranslate Statistical Machine Translation
One of AppTek’s major goals is to improve the performance of electronic translation through innovative technology. AppTek is the only company worldwide that uses a self-learning, flexible system based on a statistical approach. PlainTranslate uses this technology to translate individual words as well as complete HTML pages and other documents. The functionality is presented in a user-friendly interface. The key advantage of PlainTranslate is an integrated, interactive process that allows the user to make corrections that the system learns, thereby continually improving the quality of translation. PlainTranslate offers Unicode support and is, in principle, language independent. The system can also be optimized according to specific customer needs.
PlainTranslate is a self-learning system that, through a brief learning phase, can be optimized for any particular area of application (domain) such as medicine, sports, or computer science. The training phase uses several domain-specific example texts that are available in the input and output language. With this pairing of data, the system is able to generate a complete translation system following a short training period. The quality of the translation is continually improved through interactive work with the system.
PlainTranslate separates the pages that are to be processed into individual text blocks (phrases) that are presented in a table overview for translation. Using these phrases, a translation server calculates the translation. These results are used to create the desired translation, which has the same characteristics as the source text. The user-friendly interface offers different navigation choices: Through simple mouse functions the user can move from a phrase in the table to the corresponding position in the source or output text. In addition to translating single Web pages (e.g., from an Intranet) PlainTranslate also offers the ability to translate entire Web page hierarchies (e.g., from the Internet). Moreover, PlainTranslate can translate Microsoft Word documents as well as files with any commonly used document format. The software also offers a dictionary function that allows users to enter individual words that are automatically translated.
The interactive process of PlainTranslate allows the user to integrate otherwise separate steps in the work flow. Users can enter corrections and other changes that fit their individual needs. The program automatically learns these and applies them in future translations. ExampleFor each word or phrase, the system offers alternatives (synonyms) from which the user can choose. Further, for each word or phrase, the user can enter his or her own translation. This translation is transmitted to the server and through this interaction the server learns the optimal translation for that text block. If that text block appears in another context, the system already knows the best possible translation. This process allows the user to individually train the system and continually improve the translation quality. What are the advantages of the PlainTranslate technology? The continuous use of a self-learning translation system such as PlainTranslate offers a number of advantages over a traditional rule-based approach. The statistical approach used by PlainTranslate increases the quality of translation continually through interactive learning. The PlainTranslate Client is written in JAVA™ and can therefore be used on any platform that supports JAVA™ version 2 or has the runtime environment 1.4 of Sun Microsystems. Because it can work with multiple servers the system is always available even if a single server fails. The variable infrastructure allows larger companies to connect multiple servers in the Intranet.
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