Computer and communications technologies are increasingly being used to make access to information sources simple, rapid, and economical. When the information needed is recorded in a foreign language, however, modern efficiency yields to the slow, expensive, and arduous efforts of a human translator. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Onyx Consulting, Inc. examines the feasibility of a new approach to translation that will achieve very fast translations. The proposed approach combines two previously used translation methods: semi-automated tools, such as computer-based multi-lingual dictionaries, designed to help human translators work more productively, and fully automatic machine translation systems to replace human translators, with a third method-automatic speech recognition. Specifically, Onyx Consulting will use knowledge, which can be automatically extracted from the source document to constrain the speech recognition problem enough to achieve good word accuracy. Additional software tools allow for the transcribed translation to be rapidly corrected and cross-checked with the original. By eliminating the need to type the bulk of the translation, the overall time needed to complete a written translation can be substantially reduced. The proposed system has far-reaching implications for current and future translation practices as well as for the future uses of information technology that are currently precluded by the cost of translation. The potential customers of the proffered translation technology include all the translators at the United Nations, European Commission, NATO, OAS and other international organizations, scientific collaborators with foreign colleagues, and translators in the medical domain.
