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<Paper uid="P93-1001">
  <Title>Char_align: A Program for Aligning Parallel Texts at the Character Level</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Parallel texts have recently received considerable attention in machine translation (e.g., Brown et al, 1990), bilingual lexicography (e.g., Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1990), and terminology research for human translators (e.g., Isabelle, 1992). We have been most interested in the terminology application.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Translators find it extremely embarrassing when &amp;quot;store&amp;quot; (in the computer sense) is translated as &amp;quot;grocery,&amp;quot; or when &amp;quot;magnetic fields&amp;quot; is translated as &amp;quot;magnetic meadows.&amp;quot; Terminology errors of this kind are all too common because the translator is generally not as familiar with the subject domain as the author of the source text or the readers of the target text. Parallel texts could be used to help translators overcome their lack of domain expertise by providing them with the ability to search previously translated documents for examples of potentially difficult expressions and see how they were translated in the past.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> While pursuing this possibility with a commercial translation organization, AT&amp;T Language Line Services, we discovered that we needed to completely redesign our alignment programs in order to deal more effectively with texts supplied by AT&amp;T Language Line's customers in whatever format they happen to be available in. All too often these texts are not available in electronic form. And even if they are available in electronic form, it may not be worth the effort to clean them up by hand.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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