Mt from an Everyday User's Point of View

This paper discusses the experiences of the specialised Danish translation company Lingtech in its use of MT for the translation of technical texts. The background and motivation for setting up Lingtech as an MT-based company is outlined. After a short general presentation of the PaTrans MT-system, the different tasks we have to perform in relation to our use of MT and the way this work is organized in order to achieve maximum cost-efficiency are described. This leads on to the discussion of problem areas for the everyday user in terms of ergonomy and tools for what may be called 'peripheral' tasks, e.g. preand post-editing texts, and dictionary maintenance. In the course of gaining experience in running an MT-based organization, we have identified crucial areas, where even relatively simple tools can have quite an impact on the overall productivity and profitability of using MT. Given the state-ofthe-art within language technology many useful tools can now be made for the MT-user; however, we argue that too little attention has been given to these aspects so far and that they may indeed be critical to the commercial success of machine translation. 0. Introduction Even though machine translation has been around for years, it still seems that only few private companies have exploited its possibilities to any greater extent, let alone based their translation tasks on the use of some of the more advanced solutions. The Danish translation company Lingtech, situated in the center of Copenhagen in Denmark, is a clear exception to this. Since the end of 1993 when the machine translation system was first introduced into the organization, PaTrans has been used to translate technical texts from English into Danish. This has lead to increased productivity, better consistency and quality in the finalized translations, and to a considerable reduction in translation costs. To us it has become clear that using machine translation in its proper context pays off. However, we have also learned that the gains can be even more impressive when more attention is devoted to work-flow organization and to providing still better ‘peripheral’ tools to help MT-users tackle some of their time-consuming, costly, and tiresome daily tasks. Experiences from Lingtech's past and present emphasizes the paramount importance of these aspects for the true commercial success of machine translation. This paper illustrates the point. But first, how did it all start?