EXTRA: a system for example-based translation assistance

Nowadays we are witnessing the need to translate ever increasing quantities of texts, with an ever increasing quality. The expertise and skill of professional translators is not alone entirely sufficient in order to achieve highly effective and efficient translation performance. The best way to translate very large quantities of documents, while ensuring optimal translation time and costs, is to exploit Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT), which is devised in the aim of achieving better quality and quantity in less time, while preserving and treasuring the richness and accuracy that only human translation can achieve. In this paper we present EXTRA (EXample-based TRanslation Assistant), the EBMT system we have developed over the last few years to support the translation of texts written in Western languages. EXTRA is able to propose effective translation suggestions by relying on syntactic analysis of the text and on a rigorous, language-independent measure; the search is performed efficiently in large amounts of bilingual texts thanks to its advanced retrieval techniques. Furthermore, EXTRA does not use external knowledge requiring the intervention of users and is completely customizable and portable as it has been implemented on top of a standard DataBase Management System (DBMS). In the paper we also provide a thorough evaluation of both the effectiveness and the e±ciency of our system. In particular, in order to quantify the benefits offered by EXTRA assisted translation over manual translation, we introduce a simulator implementing specifically devised statistical, process-oriented, discrete-event models.