DFKI-LT - QTLaunchPad

Preparation and Launch of a Large-Scale Action for Quality Translation Technology

Quality translation of text into other languages is in higher demand today than ever before. Europe is the region where the lack of fast, affordable quality translation hurts the most. Despite considerable progress in Machine Translation (MT), which has enabled many new applications for automatic translation, the quality barriers for outbound translations, i.e., translations to be published or distributed outside an organisation, are not yet overcome. As a consequence, fewer translations are produced today than are needed for optimal business or required by law.

QTLaunchPad will assemble the best European centres of Machine Translation research, the most sophisticated and enthusiastic large-scale users of translation technology including enlightened potential users, technophile and quality conscious translation service and language tools providers, and resources and experienced technology integrators.

Together they will prepare a major push in translation technology concentrating on over-coming existing barriers to translation quality. To this end they will

• assemble and provide needed data and tools including specialised translation corpora, test suites and tools for quality assessment,
• create a shared quality metrics for human and machine translation,
• improve automatic translation quality estimation,
• extend an existing platform for resource-sharing to the needs of quality MT research,

and, last but not least, plan and launch a large scale research and innovation action for a breakthrough in quality translation technology.

Funded by:	European Union
Project Manager:	Hans Uszkoreit (Hans.Uszkoreit@dfki.de)
Contact:	Aljoscha Burchardt (Aljoscha.Burchardt@dfki.de)
Duration:	01.07.2012 - 30.06.2014
Partners:	QT Launchpad is led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). The consortium consists of the Center for Next Generation Localisation at Dublin City University (CNGL), Athena Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), and the University of Sheffield. QTLaunchPad cooperates closely with stakeholder groups such as the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).