Controlled Language Translation Conference
26 May 2003

Andy Way (Computer Applications), Dorothy Kenny (SALIS) and Sharon O'Brien (SALIS)

Up to 100 academic and industrial researchers from around 17 countries gathered at Dublin City University from May 15th to 17th 2003, to discuss the twin themes of Controlled Language and Machine Translation in the first ever international conference on Controlled Language Translation.

The conference, which received substantial support from Science Foundation Ireland and industrial sponsors such as IBM and MSX International, attracted equal numbers of delegates from industry and academia, with almost three quarters of delegates coming from overseas. It also marked the first ever joint endeavour by the European Association for Machine Translation and the special interest group known as CLAW (after the series of Controlled Language Applications Workshops organised by the group).

(left)Steven Krauwer of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and co-ordinator of ELSNET, the European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies and Lou Cremers, translation technology manager at Océ Technologies, the Netherlands

Harold Somers and John Hutchins, authors of the seminal works in Machine Translation, including Hutchins (1986) Machine Translation: past, present, future and Hutchins and Somers (1992) An Introduction to Machine Translation.

As its name suggests, the conference had a double focus: controlled language and (machine) translation. Controlled languages are subsets of natural languages like English or French, where rules are used to restrict the grammatical structures and even the vocabulary that writers are allowed to use in particular domains. Traditionally, controlled languages fall into two major categories. There are controlled languages that are designed to improve a text's readability for human readers, particularly non-native speakers of a language. A good example here is a controlled language that simplifies the English writers can use in aircraft maintenance manuals. There are also controlled languages that are designed to improve the computational processing of texts. For example, technical writers might have to write in a controlled language to facilitate machine translation, ie translation by computer.

Machine Translation (MT), the second focus of the conference, has a history dating back to at least the 1950s, but became a mass consumer good at the end of the 1990s with the advent of free (low-end) MT on the world wide web. Unlike casual users of MT on the web, users of higher-end MT systems, for example in industry or international organisations, typically customise these systems for their own needs, by adding relevant vocabulary and translations to the systems' dictionaries, or changing grammatical rules, for instance. They may also endeavour to improve the system's chance of producing acceptable output by controlling the input that the system has to deal with in the first place. This is where the areas of Controlled Language and MT begin to overlap; and it is this overlap that the Controlled Language Translation Conference addressed, for the first time, in a dedicated international forum.

Dublin City University has a proud history of research and teaching in the area of translation technology, with two major research centres active in the area (the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies http://www.ctts.dcu.ie/) and the National Centre for Language Technology http://www.computing.dcu.ie/research/nclt/), as well as undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in translation studies and computational linguistics, in the Schools of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies and Computer Applications. The local organisers, Andy Way, Sharon O'Brien and Dorothy Kenny, were particularly pleased that DCU hosted this prestigious conference on behalf of CLAW and the EAMT.

For further details on the conference programme and sponsors, see http://www.eamt.org/eamt-claw03/.