TransSearch: What are translators looking for?
Elliott Macklovitch, Guy Lapalme, Fabrizio Gotti · 2008
Notwithstanding machine translation’s im-pressive progress over the last decade, many translators remain convinced that the output of even the best MT systems is not sufficient to facilitate the production of publication-quality texts. To increase their productivity they turn instead to translator support tools. We exam-ine the use of one such tool: TransSearch, an online bilingual concordancer. From the mil-lions of requests stored in the system’s logs over a 6-year period, we extracted and ana-lyzed the most frequently submitted queries, in an effort to characterize the kinds of prob-lems for which translators turn to this system for help. What we discover, somewhat sur-prisingly, is that our system seems particularly well-suited to help translate highly polyse-mous adverbials and prepositional phrases. 1