The Translation Market

As global marketing expands, industrialists are increasingly involved in aggressive export strategies. and the translation of technical and commercial documentation into the various national languages is a prerequisite for market penetration.

The translation market is huge, and is expanding by 10% each year. In 1992 the worldwide expenditure for translation reached 60 billion French francs. This represents approximately 250 million pages per year. But this is just 5 to 10% of the real need. The potential market is estimated at 2.5 billion pages per annum.

Due to the increasing cost of the translated page, which currently lies between 250 and 500 French francs, there is a great divergence between the real need and the funding capacity of industry. This impairs large-scale translation projects.

The only solution is software engineering, using tools designed to increase the productivity of the translator and to standardize the multilingual documentation production process.

Introducing Eurolang

Eurolang is a third generation MT system. It is a EUREKA project that started in 1991 with an investment of 500 million French francs. We are building more than just a translation engine; we are developing a complete range of translation tools for the PC and workstation environments. The first line of products should reach the market at the end of 1994. Eurolang represents an extension of two of Europe's finest second generation MT systems, Sonovision ITEP Technologies' ARIANE and Siemens-Nixdorf's METAL. These two companies have joined forces to develop Eurolang.

But which languages?

The focus of the majority of localisation work at present is on English as a source language. As European interdependence increases, the need to handle multiple language pairs will be come more urgent. One indirect measure of the level of cross- language contact is the volume of trade between EC member states. As the chart above shows, the "source" languages of the most active trading partners is not usually English. In fact, of the 12 biggest trading "partnerships" within the EC, the UK is a member of only three. Trade with North America, of course, will continue to make English an important language. But in a multilingual Europe, German (5/12), French (8/12), and Italian (2/12) are equally important.

Eurolang also benefits from the knowledge and resources of major industrial partners such as Krupp Industries, Matra Marconi Space, Hachette, Sligos, Cap Gemini, Rank Xerox Limited, Thamus, BDE and CNET, and the expertise of the leading European universities.

Eurolang will include all the language pairs for English, French and German. This represents up to 80% of the European translation market. English to Spanish, Spanish to English, English to Italian, and Italian to English language pairs are also in the specification.

An extension to Russian is planned because there is substantial demand for it.

Eurolang's Product Development

Multilinguality Index Foreign Language Use in Major European Markets
	EC Average	France	Germany	Italy	Nether- lands	Spain	UK
High Use	30.3	28.7	31.6	35.6	48	30.4	13.2
Moderate Use	5.8	3.5	6.8	7.1	13.4	4.6	1.3
Low Use	2.9	3.5	3.7	4.1	4.4	4.7	0.7

Source: Ovum Ltd., 1992
The Ovum Multilinguality Index

Ovum studies the European office market from many perspectives. To track the need for language technology, and opportunities for suppliers in this market, we maintain a "multilinguality index" based on the use of foreign language text. The index is derived from a survey carried out for the European Commission in 1990, of office workers in all EC member states. It calculates three levels of engagement with foreign language: low use, which is casual reading and occasional composing in a foreign language, moderate use which is regular composition and occasional translation, and high use which is daily translation of text. Multilinguality indices for the major EC markets is displayed in the chart above.

Eurolang will offer a complete set of translation productivity and management tools for the existing working environment of the translator. This means that the translator is free to remain using his or her preferred word processing or desktop publishing software.

There are two ranges of Eurolang products:

• a high-quality, low-cost Machine-Assisted Human Translation product, known as MAHT, which includes a range of productivity tools without a translation engine, and
• a fully automated Machine Translation system, incorporating a translation engine derived from the METAL and ARIANE technologies.

The MAHT tools contain productivity aids for the professional translator:

• a translation memory
• terminology management system
• electronic dictionaries

The translation memory is a feature that identifies and retrieves partial and complete sentences which have been previously translated.

The terminology management system will enable the translator to create, update, and consult glossaries or dictionaries. For example, a user will be able to identify the technical terms in a text which are already stored in a terminological data base and get translations for them. The system also helps create a synonym dictionary or a thesaurus as it permits the user to link concepts with terms.

In addition, the translator is provided with a range of electronic dictionaries which are used to consult, manage and input terms directly into the text. This includes monolingual and bilingual dictionaries as well as specialized dictionaries.

The MT module will consist of a translation engine and a range of editing tools to modify its output.

The translation engine uses the linguistic knowledge available in the grammars and dictionaries. The system processes the translation in three phases:

• analysis of the source language;
• transfer, and;
• the generation (synthesis) into the target language.

A number of translation alternatives can be proposed to the translator, who is then free to display the text and/or edit it according to the environment configured.

Eurolang's Direction

We envisage other Eurolang applications for the future:

• multilingual electronic data interchange
• hypertext electronic documentation
• personal MT
• multilingual database querying.

The Eurolang products will have an open architecture. Third party add-ons, such as spelling, grammar and style checking, speech processing, can easily integrated.

For more information contact EUROLANG at:

BP 35, 94701 Maisons-Alfort Cedex, France
Tel: +331 45 13 0500 Fax: +331 45 13 0559
Email: eurolang@site-maisons-alfort.fr