Курсы машинного перевода для языков России/Session 8

Case studies

The following case studies highlight different development styles.

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Objectives

It is important when starting a project to ask questions and clearly define objectives, for example,

• Who is the target audience ?
  • Do we want the system to be used by professional translators, by lay-translators, by ordinary members of the public ?
• What is the system intended to be used for ?
  • Assimilation: For giving an idea of what a text is about
  • Dissemination: For producing draft translations
  • Domain: Will it be used for news texts, encyclopaedic texts, legal texts, etc. ?
• What existing linguistic resources can be reused ?
  • Are there already good, free dictionaries available ?
• How long do we have to build the system ?

If a system is being planned to translate governmental texts for dissemination, then it will necessarily have different features than if it is planned to translate Wikipedia articles for assimilation.

Making a high-coverage, open domain system for assimilation and dissemination is a nice idea, but practically is not possible given limited resources.

Time

The amount of time taken to make a new language pair based on the Apertium platform depends greatly on the objectives of the project, the existing resources available and the experience of the developers. A prototype or proof of concept system can be created in anywhere from 10 days to 3 months. Whereas a production system can take from 3 months (as in the case of Nynorsk-Bokmål) to several years.

Funding

Apertium language pairs have been funded and created in many different ways.

The following table summarises the ways in which development on the "stable" machine translation systems in Apertium was funding. The most used systems online are highlighted in bold face.

Funder	Type	Language pair(s)
Google Summer of Code	Competition	mk-bg, nn-nb, sh-mk, sv-da, tr-az, tr-ky
—	Volunteers	eo-fr, es-an, mk-en, ca-it, eo-en
Generalitat de Catalunya	Regional government	oc-ca, oc-es, en-ca,
—	Thesis / Dissertation	cy-en, fr-ca, pt-ca
Universitat d'Alacant	Educational institution	eu-es, (br-fr), es-pt
Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism	National government	es-ca, es-gl
ABC Enciklopedioj	Company	eo-es, eo-ca
imaxin|software	Company	en-gl, pt-gl
Universidá d'Uviéu	Educational institution	es-ast
Prompsit	Company	es-it, (br-fr), (fr-es)
Eleka Ingenieritza Linguistikoa	Company	fr-es
Icelandic Research Council	National government	is-en
Ofis ar Brezhoneg	Quasi non-governmental organisation	br-fr
European Assoc. Machine Translation	Non-governmental organisation	eu-en