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TransSearch: from a bilingual concordancer to a translation finder

  • Original Paper
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Machine Translation

Abstract

As basic as bilingual concordancers may appear, they are some of the most widely used computer-assisted translation tools among professional translators. Nevertheless, they still do not benefit from recent breakthroughs in machine translation. This paper describes the improvement of the commercial bilingual concordancer TransSearch in order to embed a word alignment feature. The use of statistical word alignment methods allows the system to spot user query translations, and thus the tool is transformed into a translation search engine. We describe several translation identification and postprocessing algorithms that enhance the application. The excellent results obtained using a large translation memory consisting of 8.3 million sentence pairs are confirmed via human evaluation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIRO—Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128 succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada

    Julien Bourdaillet, Stéphane Huet, Philippe Langlais & Guy Lapalme

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  1. Julien Bourdaillet
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  2. Stéphane Huet
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  3. Philippe Langlais
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  4. Guy Lapalme
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Correspondence to Julien Bourdaillet.

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Bourdaillet, J., Huet, S., Langlais, P. et al. TransSearch: from a bilingual concordancer to a translation finder. Machine Translation 24, 241–271 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10590-011-9089-6

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