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<Paper uid="W00-0507">
  <Title>TransType: a Computer--Aided Translation Typing System</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> TRANSTYPE is a project set up to explore an appealing solution to the problem of using Interactive Machine Translation (IMT) as a tool for professional or other highly-skilled translators. IMT first appeared as part of Kay's MIND system (Kay, 1973), where the user's role was to help the computer analyze the source text by answering questions about word sense, ellipsis, phrasal attachments, etc. Most later work on IMT, eg (Blanchon, 1991; Brown and Nirenburg, 1990; Maruyama and Watanabe, 1990; Whitelock et al., 1986), has followed in this vein, concentrating on improving the question/answer process by having less questions, more friendly ones, etc. Despite progress in these endeavors, systems of this sort are generally unsuitable as tools for skilled trans\]\[ators because the user serves only as an advisor, with the MT components keeping overall control over the translation process.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> TRANSTYPE originated from the conviction that a better approach to IMT for competent translators would be to shift the focus of interaction from the meaning of the source text to the form of the target text. This would relieve the translator of the burden of having to provide explicit analyses of the source text and allow him to translate naturally, assisted by the machine whenever possible.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this approach, a translation emerges from a series of alternating contributions by human and machine. The machine's contributions are basically proposals for parts of the target text, while the translator's can take many forms, including pieces of target text, corrections to a previous machine contribution, hints about the nature of the desired translation, etc. In all cases, the translator remains directly in control of the process: the machine must respect the constraints implicit in his contributions, and he or she is free to accept, modify, or completely ignore its proposals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> So TRANSTYPE is a specialized text editor with an embedded Machine translation engine as one of its components. In this project we had to address the following problems: how to interact with the user and how to find appropriate multi-word units for suggestions that can be computed in real time.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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