Assimilation and Dissemination

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MT systems are useful for mainly two tasks:

• creating almost-translated text that needs post-editing before being publishable, and

• creating an understandable translation of a foreign text for getting the gist of some text.

In the gisting task the user does not know the foreign language, while in the post-editing task, the user is a translator who does know the foreign/source language (and will often be reading both the source text and the translation).

MT of post-editing quality into a lesser-resourced language can help with creating more text in that language. We call this dissemination.

MT of gisting quality from a lesser-resourced language can help with letting people who don't speak that language understand text (e.g. blogs, news articles) written in that language (thus removing an argument against writing in the lesser-resourced language). We call this assimilation.

One way of making MT systems more useful is to make their applications/use-cases more restricted. The "ideal" MT system would do Fully Automatic High Quality MT of Unrestricted text between any language pair. No such system exists :-) The systems that are considered successful are the ones that have removed part of the ideal requirements. For example, Meteo was successful already in the early 80's by translating only a restricted domain (weather reports). Some systems are successful because they focus on gisting, where the demand for quality is a lot lower (a reader won't mind much if you always leave out the word "the" when translating from Russian, whereas a post-editor would find it a chore). If we don't require translating between distant languages, the task of getting post-editable-quality results can be easier due to more overlap in vocabulary and syntax etc. (this has typically been Apertium's niche).