Assimilation and Dissemination

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.