Supporting Multilingual Document Production: Machine Translation or Multilingual Generation?

In this paper, we look at the current scenario in multilingual documentation generation, identifying the reasons for the introduction of computational tools into the process and the types of tools currently provided in support of the translation tasks. We note that certain requirements of the multilingual documentation task cannot be satisfied by the tools currently available and identify what the problems are. We examine trends now emerging in the document industry, observing a reorganisation of the workflow. Based on these observations, we hypothesize that, as a radically different approach to supporting the multilingual documentation effort, multilingual generation can offer assistance in situations where current translation-based tools are very limited. We believe that, in fact, the type This work is partially supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant J19221, by the British Council grant BC/DAAD ARC Project 293, and the Commission of the European Union Grant LRE-62009. Anthony Hartley is also a member of the Language Centre of the University of Brighton. of support afforded by multilingual generation is one that fits well with the new trends in the document industry and that, ultimately, translationoriented systems and generation-based systems can be employed in complementary ways to provide a suite of tools to support the documentation process.