Machine translation for monolinguals

We describe sister machine translation prototypes, Ntran, an English to Japanese system developed at UMIST, and Aidtrans, Japanese to English, at Sheffield, both designed for use by an English monolingual. Aidtrans uses extensive and sophisticated collocational analysis radically to reduce the need for conventional post-editing. Ntran offers interactive query at three stages: on-line dictionary update, syntactic disambiguation, and Japanese lexical selection. The second of these is described and illustrated in particular detail, and the underlying philosophy of monolingual interaction discussed.