Using existing human translations to aid machine translation to a new language

Question

In the past, my company has used human, professional translators to translate our software from English into some 13 languages. It's expensive but the quality is high.

The application we're translating contains industry jargon. It also contains a lot of sentence fragments and single words which, out of context, are unlikely to be correctly translated.

I am wondering if there is a machine translation system or service that could use our existing professionally-generated translations to more accurately create a machine translation into any new language.

If an industry term, phrase or sentence fragment has been translated from en-US to es-AR, pt-BR, cs-CZ, etc., then couldn't those prior translations be used as a hint regarding what the correct word choice should be for some new language? They could be used, in a sense, to triangulate. At worst, they could be used to create a majority voting system (e.g. if 9 of 13 languages translated a phrase to the same thing in the new language, we go with it).

Is anyone aware of a machine translation service that works like this?

Answer 1

I have no idea about tranlation systems, but such functionality -- custom translations for specific words -- will be offered by any commercial system, I guess. It is even possible with google translate by clicking on the book with the star on cover.

As a trivial non-invasive method, you could for each goal-language make up a dictionary [] the required terminology in the form [word-as-is-translated, word-as-should-be-translated], where you have an N:1 relationship (in one language multiple word-as-is-translated should be mapped to one word-as-should-be-translated. The words word-as-is-translated thereby depend on the actual translation system).

After preparing those dictionaries, you can simply search the translation result for those words and replace them with the desired words.