Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
input language is not English, the back-translation of the input message is shown in the
“Back-translation of English translation” text box. Comparing the original message and
the back-translation, if they are similar in meaning, we check the “OK” check-box to
confirm the translation.
However, if the back-translation does not make sense, we fix the original message
and retranslate it until the back-translation makes sense. Finally, after confirming the
back-translation, we press the “Paste” button. The message is translated into three lan-
guages except English and the input language, and the set of messages in five languages
is pasted on the disaster safety map as a note, as mentioned in the previous section.
When we write a message in English, we just press the “Paste” button. The message
is translated into four languages except English and is pasted on the map. In this case,
there is no way to confirm the translation quality. Discussion on how to translate a
message into multiple languages is given in the next section.
5
Multilingual Translation
When we initially designed the translation process of CoSMOS, we displayed the back-
translation for four languages except the input language, so the user has to check the
quality of translation in each language referring to the back-translation, as shown in
Fig. 7(a). However, this method takes a long time to translate the input message and re-
trieve its back-translations. It needs 8 translations (one regular translation and one back-
translation for each of 4 languages). In addition, if some back-translations are incorrect,
the user has to repeat to fix and retranslate the message until the back-translations make
sense. These process increases the burden of the user to post messages.
As a remedy to cope with this problem, we use only English to confirm the transla-
tion quality, as shown in Fig. 7(b). When the input message is not English, the system
translates it into English once and back-translate the English translation to confirm the
translation quality. If we confirm the quality, the English translation is further translated
into the other languages with no confirmation.
This method takes a shorter time to translate a message than the initial method.
It needs only 5 translations (four regular translations and one back-translation). To
Chinese
Chinese
English
Japanese
Japanese
English
French
French
Turkish
Turkish
(a) Direct translation
(b) English-mediated translation
Fig. 7.
Two methods of multilingual translation (from Japanese)
