Cascading translation services

Abstract

The Language Grid offers a broad array of language services such as dictionaries and translation, and cascading them enables people in different parts of the world to communicate with one another in their mother tongue. However, when cascading several translation services, words’ meanings often drift due to the inconsistency, asymmetry and intransitivity of word selection. In this section, we propose context-based coordination to maintain the consistency of word meanings. For this, we put forth a method to automatically generate multilingual equivalent terms based on the use of bilingual dictionaries. We generated trilingual equivalent noun terms and implemented a Japanese-to-German-and-back translation, cascading four translation services. The evaluation results showed that the generated terms can cover over 58% of all nouns. Translation quality was improved by 41% for all sentences, and the quality rating for all sentences increased by an average of 0.47 points on a five-point scale.