METHOD FOR TRANSLATING DOCUMENTS FROM ONE LANGUAGE INTO ANOTHER USING A DATABASE OF TRANSLATIONS, A TERMINOLOGY DICTIONARY, A TRANSLATION DICTIONARY, AND A MACHINE TRANSLATION SYSTEM

• US 20090070099A1
• Filed: 08/06/2008
• Published: 03/12/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 10/10/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: ABBYY Development LLC
• Original Assignee: ABBYY InfoPoisk LLC
• Inventors: ANISIMOVICH, KONSTANTIN, Zuev, Konstantin, Selegey, Vladimir
• Granted Patent: US 8,548,795 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/5
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/268 Morphological analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/284 Lexical analysis, e.g. tokenisation or collocates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/30 Semantic analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/55 Rule-based translation

Abstract

In one embodiment, the invention provides a method for translating a document in an input language into an output language comprising: a) for each document fragment for which a translation is readily available, translating said document fragment based on said readily available translation; and b) for each remaining untranslated fragment for which a translation is not readily available, translating said untranslated fragment based on a model-based machine translation technique. A translation is readily available if a search reveals at least one matching translation for the document fragment in a translation database.

Claims

1. A method for translating a document in an input language into an output language comprising:

a) for each document fragment for which a translation is readily available, translating said document fragment based on said readily available translation; and

b) for each remaining untranslated fragment for which a translation is not readily available, translating said untranslated fragment based on a model-based machine translation technique.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein steps a) and b) are performed automatically.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein a translation is readily available if a search reveals at least one matching translation for the document fragment in a translation database.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising performing the search.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the search reveals at least one matching translation.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the search is an exact search where the or each matching translation corresponds exactly to the document fragment.

7. The method of claim 5, wherein the search is a fuzzy search where the or each matching translation does not correspond exactly to the document fragment and includes at least one differing word that is not in the document fragment.

8. The method of claim 6, wherein said translating comprises substituting one matching translation for the document fragment.

9. The method of claim 7, wherein said translating comprises substituting one matching translation for the document fragment based on the matching translation and substituting each differing word in the matching translation based on a lookup of the differing word in at least one of a terminology dictionary and a translation dictionary.

10. The method of claim 8, or claim 9, wherein the one matching translation is the matching translation in the case of a single matching translation or a selected matching translation from a set of translation variants in the case of more that one matching translation.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising selecting the matching translation variant from the set of translation variants.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein said selecting is performed by a machine.

13. The method of claim 11, wherein said selecting is performed with assistance from a human operator.

14. The method of claim 12, further comprising allowing a human to edit the selected translation variant.

15. The method of claim 1, further comprising segmenting the document into fragments as a prior step.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein said segmenting is performed by a machine.

17. The method of claim 16, further comprising allowing human operator to edit the document fragments generated by said segmenting.

18. The method of claim 15, wherein said segmenting is performed with human assistance.

19. The method of claim 3, further comprising performing one of creating and selecting the translation database.

20. The method of claim 9, further comprising performing one of creating and selecting the terminology dictionary for a given subject domain.

21. The method of claim 9, further comprising performing one of creating and selecting the translation dictionary for a given subject domain

22. The method of claim 1, wherein the model-based machine translation technique comprises using linguistic descriptions to build the semantic structure to represent the meaning of each untranslated fragment and provides syntactically coherent output.

23. A system, comprising:

a processor; and

a memory coupled to the processor, the memory comprising a translation application which when executed causes the system to perform a method for translating a document in an input language into an output language comprising;

a) for each document fragment for which a translation is readily available, translating said document fragment based on said readily available translation; and

b) for each remaining untranslated fragment for which a translation is not readily available, translating said untranslated fragment based on a model-based machine translation technique.

24. The system of claim 23, wherein steps a) and b) are performed automatically.

25. The system of claim 24, wherein a translation is readily available if a search reveals at least one matching translation for the document fragment in a translation database.

26. The system of claim 25, wherein the method further comprises performing the search.

27. The system of claim 26, wherein the search reveals at least one matching translation.

29. The system of claim 27, wherein the search is a fuzzy search where the or each matching translation does not correspond exactly to the document fragment and includes at least one differing word that is not in the document fragment.

31. The system of claim 29, wherein said translating comprises substituting one matching translation for the document fragment based on the matching translation and substituting each differing word in the matching translation based on a lookup of the differing word in at least one of a terminology dictionary and a translation dictionary.

28. The method of system 27, wherein the search is an exact search where the or each matching translation corresponds exactly to the document fragment.

30. The system of claim 28, wherein said translating comprises substituting one matching translation for the document fragment.

32. The method of claim 30, or claim 31, wherein the one matching translation is the matching translation in the case of a single matching translation or a selected matching translation from a set of translation variants in the case of more that one matching translation.

33. The system of claim 32, further comprising selecting the matching translation variant from the set of translation variants.

34. The system of claim 33, wherein said selecting is performed by a machine.

35. The system of claim 33, wherein said selecting is performed with assistance from a human operator.

36. A computer storage medium having stored thereon a program which when executed performs a method for translating a document in an input language into an output language, comprising:

a) for each document fragment for which a translation is readily available, translating said document fragment based on said readily available translation; and

b) for each remaining untranslated fragment for which a translation is not readily available, translating said untranslated fragment based on a model-based machine translation technique.

37. The computer storage medium of claim 36, wherein steps a) and b) are performed automatically.

38. The computer storage medium of claim 37, wherein a translation is readily available if a search reveals at least one matching translation for the document fragment in a translation database.