A Micro-Primer for Law Librarians on Machine Translation

By Don Ford

FCIL Librarian University of Iowa College of LawProgram G-5

 AALL 2013, Seattle, Washington

PAC-Rim Legal Values

Moderator: Don Ford

Speakers: Rob Britt, Tom Kimbrough, Jootaek “Juice” Lee,

Sergio Stone, Roy Sturgeon

Translation

• Translating/translation: written rendition of a document or recording from one language into another language.

• High level of accuracy required.• Sufficient time or staffing available for

translator(s) to consult multiple resources to ensure precision.

Translation Insight from a former director of the Munich Sprachen & Dolmetscher Institute

“Privy Councilor Gautier was justified in taking the position that translations into a foreign language are best made by those people with a native’s command of that [target] language.” [Translation by Don Ford]

Basic translation principles include:

• Lexical analysis (defining)– Auswirkung: effect, impact, ramification

• Morphological analysis (parsing)– Auswirkung, Auswirkungen

• Syntactic analysis (defining in context)– effects versus impacts versus ramifications

• Cultural analysis (enculturating)– Zivilisation versus Kultur

Machine Translation (MT)Examples of Commercial Vendors

• Asian Companies– Asia Online– CCID– East Linden– Kodensha– Fujitsu– Toshiba – Precision Translation Tools

• European Companies – Pangeanic– Applied Language Solutions

Machine Translation (MT)

• Systran• Yahoo Babel Fish (powered by Systran)• Prompt Translator • Google Language Tools• Google Toolbar Tab• Microsoft Translator (Bing Translator)

Der O.-J.-Simpson-Prozess: das strafprozessuale Vorverfahren und dessen Auswirkungen in rechtsvergleichender Darstellung

Ford’s translation using print and limited online resources:

Title: The O.J. Simpson Trial: the criminal pre-trial proceedings and their implications in a comparative law presentation

MERCOSUR : la protección de los datos personales : privacidad versus derecho a la información, régimen

legal en el MERCOSUR y en la Unión Europea, hábeas data

MERCOSUR: protection of personal data: privacy versus the right to information, the legal framework of MERCOSUR and the European Union, habeas data.

MT for Asian Languages?

“Thankfully there’s been tremendous progress achieved by Asian institutions in natural language processing recently. This has been made possible by the increased availability of funds[,] as well as a growing consensus that statistical data-driven technologies coupled with traditional linguistic methods are here to stay—even for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—

Maxim Khalilov, Machine Translation and AsianLanguages, 19 January 2012

Bahasa Indonesia

Chinese Pinyin