Machine Translation for Manufacturing: A Case Study at Ford Motor Company

Machine Translation was one of the first applications of Artificial Intelligence technology that was deployed to solve real-world problems. Since the early 1960s, researchers have been building and utilizing computer systems that can translate from one language to another without extensive human intervention. In the late 1990s, Ford Vehicle Operations began working with Systran Software Inc to adapt and customize their Machine Translation (MT) technology in order to translate Ford's vehicle assembly build instructions from English to German, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese. The use of Machine Translation (MT) was made necessary by the vast amount of dynamic information that needed to be translated in a timely fashion. Our MT system has already translated over 5 million instructions into these target languages and is an integral part of our manufacturing process planning to support Ford's assembly plants in Europe, Mexico and South America. In this paper, we focus on how AI techniques, such as knowledge representation (Iwanska & Shapiro 2000) and natural language processing (Gazdar & Mellish 1989), can improve the accuracy of Machine Translation in a dynamic environment such as auto manufacturing.