From Inspiration to Commercialization

The LTRC Board of Directors has recently approved two new projects, following recommendations from the Scientific Committee:

• Collection of Translation Dictation Data (Collecte de dictées de traduction), a joint project between the Translation Bureau and NRC; and
• Revision Memory (Mémoire de révision : Étude de faisabilité sur les aides à la rédaction fondée sur une mémoire de révision), a joint project between the Translation Bureau and NRC.

Should you have any question about these projects, please contact Michel Mellinger.

In Canada and around the world, the demand for language professionals is on the rise. Young people who opt for a career in the language industry are almost certain of quickly finding themselves a job. But how do we spread the word to other young people who have not yet thought about choosing this field?

The Translation Bureau and the Language Industry Association (AILIA), two organizations who have a vested interest in the development of language occupations, have jointly published a brochure entitled Explore New Horizons: The Language Professions.

This brochure is targeted to college students and high-school students nearing graduation. It profiles the work of translators, conference interpreters, terminologists and localization specialists and, to help young people choose a career, provides an overview of the skills required to practise these professions. It also includes a list of Canadian universities that offer programs in these fields.

The brochure is distributed at career fairs and to guidance counsellors. For copies of the brochure, please e-mail either organization at translationbureau@pwgsc.gc.ca or communication@ailia.ca.

In late May, the Language Industry Association (AILIA) completed the move to its new Gatineau offices, in the Language Technologies Research Centre building. The Association’s new address is 283 Alexandre-Taché Boulevard, Suite F0240, Gatineau. Full contact information for AILIA and its staff can be found at www.illi.ca, the language industry’s brand new portal, in the Contact AILIA section.

The Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) is a non-profit organization that grew out of the government of Canada Action Plan for Official Languages. Founded in April 2005, the LTRC has been calling the Alexandre-Taché campus of the UQO (Université du Québec en Outaouais) home since May 2006. The LTRC is housed in a brand new building that was built specifically to meet its needs thanks to joint funding from Canada Economic Development (CED), MDEIE (ministère du Développement économique, de l’Innovation et de l’Exportation du Québec), and UQO.

The LTRC is a research centre whose main focus is on promoting and facilitating language technology projects. The Centre’s mission is not to conduct research; its mission is to serve as an incubator for businesses and for projects and as a guide throughout their growth. Innovative companies considering the development of new technologies, services, or processes that address the needs of the Canadian language industry or of other industries that use related technologies can submit an application for the extremely generous LTRC Host Program.

The LTRC Host Program gives companies the opportunity to benefit from a broad range of conveniences and services: office space in the LTRC’s brand new facilities, conference rooms, secretarial services, support, maintenance, access to mentoring and enterprise management training programs, as well as referral services for financing sources. However, the key benefit the LTRC provides is access to the expertise of approximately fifty researchers and to leading-edge facilities to work on projects.

Interested companies must first complete a notice of interest form (Indication d’intérêt). This form helps the LTRC confirm whether the project is consistent with its mission. If the project passes this phase, it is assigned to a counsellor who will help the company with the necessary formalities, including the preparation of the documentation required to submit an official request to the Selection Committee. If the project is accepted, then both parties enter into an agreement. This agreement specifies all applicable conditions, the main project milestones, as well as the agreed upon evaluation terms. Next, everything is set into motion to bring the project to fruition and to build both the company’s and the LTRC’s reputations.

As mentioned in a previous issue of Cybermag-TL, the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) software system PORTAGE of NRC-IIT is licenced, in a basic fully operational version called PORTAGEshared, to Canadian universities. The first three licenced universities (McGill University, Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto) are now joined in this community by Université de Montréal as well as Concordia University.

Also, PORTAGEshared is being licenced to two universities who participate in the European project SMART (Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation), in which NRC also participates as the SMT expert, i.e.: Università degli studi di Milano (Italie), and University College London (U.K.).

During its annual conferences, ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) organizes comparisons between different machine translation systems in its Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT). The summary of results for this year are now available: http://www.statmt.org/wmt07/pdf/WMT18.pdf

Of particular interest:

• an important effort has been undertaken this year to compare different methods for evaluating the performance of the systems under comparison, those being based on either human (3 methods) and automatic (11 metrics) evaluation means;
• the conclusion that three metrics that have been less commonly used for automatic evaluations are better correlated to human evaluations than the commonly used ‘Bleu score’;
• the participation of the NRC (in addition to its entry with PORTAGE) in collaboration with SYSTRAN, with a hybrid machine translation system.

WMT 2007 ( http://www.statmt.org/wmt07/ ) will be held on June 23, 2007 in Prague (Czech Republic) as part of the ACL 2007 conference ( http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/ ).

The LTRC thanks the readers of Cybermag-TL for their interest and for helping to disseminate the newsletter. This online information magazine, which is also posted on the LTRC’s website, is designed to keep language industry and information technology partners and stakeholders up to date with the latest news from the LTRC. Please continue to spread the word among your colleagues, and contact us (info@ltrc.ca) with your feedback, suggestions and comments!

Language Technologies Research Centre
283 Alexandre-Taché Boulevard
P.O. Box 1250, Hull Branch
Gatineau QC J8X 3X7
Tel. : (819) 595-3999
info@ltrc.ca

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