Context-Based Approach for Pivot Translation Services

Machine translation services available on the Web are becoming increasingly popular. However, a pivot translation service is required to realize translations between non-English languages by cascading different translation services via English. As a result, the meaning of words often drifts due to the inconsistency, asymmetry and intransitivity of word selections among translation services. In this paper, we propose context-based coordination to maintain the consistency of word meanings during pivot translation services. First, we propose a method to automatically generate multilingual equivalent terms based on bilingual dictionaries and use generated terms to propagate context among combined translation services. Second, we show a multiagent architecture as one way of implementation, wherein a coordinator agent gathers and propagates context from/to a translation agent. We generated trilingual equivalent noun terms and implemented a Japanese-to-German-and-back translation, cascading into four translation services. The evaluation results showed that the generated terms can cover over 58% of all nouns. The translation quality was improved by 40% for all sentences, and the quality rating for all sentences increased by an average of 0.47 points on a five-point scale. These results indicate that we can realize consistent pivot translation services through context-based coordination based on existing services.