On Translation Corpora and Translation Support Tools: A Project Report

For more than forty years machine translation has been an active area of research and development. Several variants of MT systems have been proposed e.g., interactive systems, batch-mode systems requiring a large amount of human post-editing and systems that generate text in several languages from a common structured set of data rather than a source text. Although there are some successful systems and several products on the market, it is still the case that most translators and translation companies prefer not to use MT-systems. In fact, it has been estimated “that the current share of anything that could be called MT, pure or mixed, is well below 1% of the total translation market” (Isabelle et al, 1993).