TAUS OPEN SOURCE MACHINE TRANSLATION SHOWCASE
Using Moses To Win Business That Would Otherwise Be Lost. Two Practical Use Cases at AVB Translations
10:00-10:20Wednesday, 17 October
Joël SiglingAVB Translations
Using Moses to win
business that would otherwise be
lost
Joël SiglingDirector Technology & Business Partners
TAUS OPEN SOURCE MACHINE TRANSLATION SHOWCASESeattle, 17 October 2012
©AVB Translations , 2012
AVB Translations background• Amstelveens Vertaalburo: founded 1972 – traditional, high-
quality agency
• Translation World: founded 2002, tech-savvy all-round player
• Merger in 2010 >> AVB Translations: premium brand with strong tech focus
• Top 5 player in The Netherlands, 2011 turnover € 4.6 million
• Core business: general translations – legal, financial, technical, …New branch: Single Language Vendor Dutch for global MLVs
History of MT interest
• Member of TAUS since 2008, 1st round table Amsterdam
• Visited TAUS User Conferences in US since 2009
• Sense of urgency developed, merger distraction 2010
• Action in 2011 after merger
• 2011: Our own choice: Dutch <> English legal domain engine
• 2012: At customer request, tourism engines English > X languages
• Why SMT, why Moses? Quicker, cheaper, similar quality (shows research)
Case 1: Legal domain engine• Legal translations about approx. 40% of AVB business, 80%
Dutch <>English
• Not the obvious choice: people said MT wouldn’t work for legal: sentences too long, material to intricate
• Statistical MT suited to non-stylistic materials: eg legal
• If this works, we can make MT happen for all other domains
Legal engine: Objectives
• Increased productivity, no BLEU % target, but tangible, practical results. How much extra can a translator do when compared to HT?
• Tool to offer usable quality with very quick turnarounds for
high volume (typical “Friday afternoon lawyer requests”) • Becoming an MT front runner in the non-localization sector for
Dutch (5th language in Europe after FIGS)
Legal engine: Development• Choice between in-house and external development
• In-house: control, developing expertise, lower long-term cost• External: lower initial cost, much more expertise > best for
now
• Our pre-requisites for development option • ownership and free access to engine• assurance data will not be used or copied by builder• Acceptable costs for development & usage• Skilled partner > AsiaOnline, CrossLang, Pangeanic, LetsMT,
SmartMate??
• CrossLang > all of the above, closest to our office, independent
Legal engine: Input data
• Highest quality AVB Dutch <>English legal translations: approx. 700k words per language. Predominantly civil law.
• Not fully reviewed AVB TM, still high-quality: approx. 10 mi. words per language. Predominantly civil law.
• Legal translations harvested by CrossLang, more diverse legal material: 7 mi. words per language
Legal engine: Initial test results
Various productivity tests done in CrossLang and TAUS productivity assessment tools (very similar):
productivity between 5% and 20% higher
for post-ediding than human-only output. These results both for very experienced legal translator and translation novice (intern).
Encouragement to continue…
Legal engine: Results in practice• Live rush ranslations done in first few weeks for new
customers: • 1,500 word trial done for law firm needing high
volume in very short time. Post-edited in 75 minutes. Customer happy with quality/price ratio.
• 25,000 words in two days with light PE effort by two post-editors. Quality estimate 80-90% of human translation.
• 4,500 words in 3 hours with almost full PE effort by one post-editor. Quality estimate >90% of human translation
• 15,000 words in one day, done by two post-editors. Quality estimate 80-90% of human translation
Legal engine: more success
• Other successes: • 7 documents translated and post-edited this way in
one court-case. Customer very happy, case won!
• Three new customers secured through the fact that we were able to turnaround a large volume in a very short time.
• • Some customers are ordering this type of translation
in stead of normal translation even with normal deadlines.
• Sales department have a new USP to sell to our legal customers. Interest is growing!
Case 2: Hotel booking engine
SITUATION• Big (4 million words) hotel booking site, partly available in 10
languages
• Booking funnel fully and best-selling hotels largely translated
Customer ambition: • Have all 4M words translated & do more languages
BUT• No budget for full human translation/post-editing • Google too expensive and risk of being considered
duplicate content at some point in the future
Booking engine: AVB solution
• Combination of TM & MT to translate all content & differentiate in quality where necessary
• Build up new TMs for “new” languages and use TM from “old” languages to create dataset for engines with harvested material
• Customer to get any TM matches for free after paying for initial baseline (20,000 words)
• Engine development paid for, but throughput almost free
Booking engine: Challenges
• Getting traction within client DMT (took two years)
• Finding enough relevant data to build a decent engine (classic)
• Deciding on KPIs from the customer: when would it be successful?
• Technical: getting workable data in and out of customer CMS
Booking engine: Results
• Two languages chosen for trial: French and Polish\
• Baseline TM built for these, all website TM matches replaced for French and Polish. Has already save customer thousands of euros.
• Two Moses engines built by TauYou as trial: French and Polish
• 1st Polish engine results were put on line as test, bookings increased in spite of poor initial language quality
• Customer has approved four more engines: Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Italian
Business conclusions
• We are already making money on MT. All investments paid back in half a year.
• Extra turnover forecast thanks to legal engine: EUR 50,000+ in 2013 + EUR 20,000 in cost savings (bottom line).
• Turnover forecast for TM+MT solution for hotel booking site in 2013: anywhere between EUR 50,000 and 200,000.
FOR AVB, MT IS A GOOD INVESTMENT!
Phone: +31 20 645.66.10Mobile: +31 625.025.475E-mail: [email protected]: @JoelAVBAdres: Ouderkerkerlaan 50
1185 AD AmstelveenThe Netherlands
Website: www.avb.nl