Combining invertible example-based machine translation with translation memory technology

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to extract invertible translation examples from pre-aligned reference translations. The set of invertible translation examples is used in the Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) system EDGAR for translation. Invertible bilingual grammars eliminate translation ambiguities such that each source language parse tree maps into only one target language string. The translation results of EDGAR are compared and combined with those of a translation memory (TM). It is shown that i) best translation results are achieved for the EBMT system when using a bilingual lexicon to support the alignment process ii) TMs and EBMT-systems can be linked in a dynamical sequential manner and iii) the combined translation of TMs and EBMT is in any case better than each of the single system.