Government organizations have used automated translation software for many years to quickly translate information from many languages into one (often referred to as assimilation) so the information can be analyzed and acted upon as necessary.
As in the commercial sector, translation needs also continue to increase for governments. At one time translation was more manageable because many foreign language documents came in the form of physical documents. However, the increase of digital content has made the government sector focus more resources on translation. The skills of human translators are highly sought after and there simply are not enough translators to meet the demand. By adding automation to the translation process, government organizations can quickly translate documents, blogs, websites, etc. using automated translation solutions and only send relevant documents to humans for a more accurate translation and analysis. In short, automation helps governments maximize their translation resources and allows human translators to work on more important translations – those that require human interpretation and analysis.
Statistical machine translation software has been deployed many ways in the government sector. The goal is to get as much content into one language as quickly as possible so that organizations have timely access to useful information from a variety of sources.
One successful deployment, through partners such as BBN Technologies and Virage, is a broadcast/media monitoring system. In this integration, users see and hear the original news broadcast in a foreign language, and see a transcription of the original broadcast and a translation provided by Language Weaver translation software. All of this is done in near real-time (5-30 minute delay from live broadcast).
Multilingual search is another successful integration with SMTS done by Mitre. This application gives users the ability to search the web in another language, such as Arabic, and returns the original Arabic search results, with the ability to translate using Language Weaver software. The benefit is that users retrieve much different and more relevant results that if they were searching only in English. Mitre has also developed a cross-lingual chat application that lets users instant message or “chat” in their native language and provides a translation for the other user.
The deployment opportunities are vast within this sector. Additional options currently available include multilingual text analytics, speech to speech translation, and ad hoc web/document translation.
In the case of government use, customization is typically not required. Most organizations want to get everything into one language, identify key topics in the data and forward to analysts and translators for complete, more accurate translations. For organizations that would like higher quality translations, Language Weaver can provide customization services, or the organization can use the Customizer Tool to do small scale customizations in-house. The latter is typically preferred because the data may be classified or require many approval steps for transfer to Language Weaver.