A research perspective on how to democratize machine translation and translation aids aiming at high quality final output

Machine Translation (MT) systems and Translation Aids (TA) aiming at costeffective high quality final translation are not yet usable by small firms, departments and individuals, and handle only a few languages and language pairs. This is due to a variety of reasons, some of them not frequently mentioned. But commercial, technical and cultural reasons make it mandatory to find ways to democratize MT and TA. This goal could be attained by: (1) giving users, free of charge, TA client tools and server resources in exchange for the permission to store and refine on the server linguistic resources produced while using TA; (2) establishing a synergy between MT and TA, in particular by using them jointly in translation projects where translators codevelop the lexical resources specific to MT; (3) renouncing the illusion of fully automatic general purpose high quality MT (FAHQMT) and go for semiautomaticity (SAHQMT), where user participation, made possible by recent technical network-oriented advances, is used to solve ambiguities otherwise computationnally unsolvable due to the impossibility, intractability or cost of accessing the necessary knowledge; (4) adopting a hybrid (symbolic & numerical) and "pivot" approach for MT, where pivot lexemes arc UNL or UNL inspired English-oriented denotations of (sets of) interlingual acceptions or word/term senses, and the rest of the representation of utterances is either fully abstract and interlingual as in UNL, or, less ambitiously but more realistically, obtained by adding to an abstract English multilevel structure features underspecified in English but essential for other languages, including minority languages.