SDL Enterprise Translation Server 2006, Service Pack 2

6/28/2006 09:30:00 AM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

SDL International has a team of software developers and computational linguists that is continually working on the automatic translation technology. Four times a year, we release an update to SDL Enterprise Translation Server. This week we installed SDL Enterprise Translation Server 2006, Service Pack 2, on the servers that provide translations for FreeTranslation.com.

There are a variety of approaches to automated translation. SDL's technology applies grammatical rules and bilingual dictionaries to render translations. So, each new release of the software has improvements to the rules and the dictionaries.

In this release, we have added substantially to the dictionaries, with particular emphasis on English/Italian, English/Dutch, French/English, and Portuguese/English. Each of those dictionaries has thousands of new words and phrases.

The most noticeable linguistic improvement in the rules for this release is the ability of the system to recognize non-contiguous phrasal verbs in English. These phrasal verbs consist of a main verb and a particle. Here “particle” is defined as an adverb that should be parsed as part of the verb even though it can be separated from the verb by certain grammatical elements. The example sentences show, however, that the meaning of the sentence does not change if the particle and verb are separated.

I wrote down your new telephone number on a piece of paper.
I wrote your new telephone number down on a piece of paper.

Because the placement of the particle does not affect the meaning of the sentence, it should also not affect the translation of the sentence. The new version of SDL Enterprise Translation Server correctly identifies phrases such as “write down”, whether or not the verb and particle are juxtaposed.

We have added approximately 500 of these special phrases to the dictionaries of our most popular language modules. You now know one of the phrases (“write down”). Can you find others?