Interactive MT As Support For Non-Native Language Authoring

The paper describes an approach to developing an interactive MT system for translating technical texts on the example of translating patent claims between Russian and English. The approach conforms to the human-aided machine translation paradigm. The system is meant for a source language (SL) speaker who does not know the target language (TL). It consists of i) an analysis module which includes a submodule of interactive syntactic analysis of SL text and a submodule of fully automated morphological analysis, ii) an automatic module for transferring the lexical and partially syntactic content of SL text into a similar content of the TL text and iii) a fully automated TL text generation module which relies on knowledge about the legal format of TL patent claims. An interactive analysis module guides the user through a sequence of SL analysis procedures, as a result of which the system produces a set of internal knowledge structures which serve as input to the TL text generation. Both analysis and generation rely heavily on the analysis of the sublanguage of patent claims. The model has been developed for English and Russian as both SLs and TLs but is readily extensible to other languages.