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: joel.sigling@avb.nlTwitter: @JoelAVBAdres: Ouderkerkerlaan 50

1185 AD AmstelveenThe Netherlands

Website: www.avb.nl