ScaleMT: a Free/Open-Source Framework for Building Scalable Machine Translation Web Services

Machine translation web services usage is growing amazingly mainly because of the translation quality and reliability of the service provided by theGoogle Ajax LanguageAPI. To allow the open-source machine translation projects to compete with Google’s one and gain visibility on the internet, we have developed ScaleMT: a free/open-source framework that exposes existing machine translation engines as public web services. This framework is highly scalable as it can run coordinately on many servers, efficiently managing the resources needed by the engines, and its API is compatible with Google’s one. ScaleMT is based on previous efforts to build a web service for the Apertium machine translation toolbox, but we have also tested it with Matxin, another free/open-source transfer-based machine translation engine. Additionally, we have compared ScaleMT to an alternative web service implementation for Apertium, obtaining satisfactory results.