Experiences with Greek users of MT
The innovative pilot program to establish a Translation
Technology Service Centre for the Greek public sector was launched
in 1994. The Centre was connected to EC-SYSTRAN via X25 and staffed
by two linguists and an engineer, all of whom were trained in
Luxembourg. One of the linguists was also specialized in public
relations so as to promote the system. This pilot programme can be
seen as something special as it was the very first time the
European Commission had made ECSYSTRAN available to the public
sector of one of the Member States. At the same time, it was
especially innovative for Greece, as the technological
infrastructure of the public sector was quite poor. The first year
was the most difficult, and the hardest problem encountered was to
explain the notion of machine translation, its purpose, its limits
and capabilities. This proved to be harder than expected since
information technology is not widespread in the Greek public
sector. Even the computer-literate had a lot of reservations as
machine translation is not widely known and often misunderstood.
Having users that are completely unaware of what new technologies
offer can cause many problems, since they do not understand the
procedure and the importance of an "error-free" input text. Through
lack of awareness, it was not uncommon for them to hand in hard
copies even when they had the text in electronic form. But if this
was to their disadvantage in terms of slowing down the translation
process, things became even worse when it came to translation
quality. In spite of the fact that a lot of time is spent in
explaining the logic behind the translation and how EC-SYSTRAN
works, users often made remarks like "the style is very
monotonous", "what a stupid mistake" etc. However, there were
others who really appreciated the facilities of modern technology
and were truly thankful. This applied mostly to users that could
now access the information written in a foreign language they did
not speak. Furthermore, it should be noted that the users who
rejected translations because of poor quality were very few.
The second year things ran more smoothly as a relatively steady
number of users was reached, and this in spite of the frequent
transfer of officials, which meant that the whole information
procedure had to start all over again every time the head of a
department changed. During the third year, most EC-SYSTRAN requests
came from regular users, an additional person was hired to deal
with the preparation of documents for translation (ie scanning,
typing etc), and generally the activities of the office settled
into a "routine" procedure. The development of the system is being
continued according to the particular needs of the Greek public
sector and users of the system are becoming more and more familiar
with the concept of machine translation.
A happy ending? That will depend on whether or not the Office
survives. Since the beginning of 1998, the whole project has been
incorporated within a new EC framework (MLIS) and, at the time of
writing, the proposal for an extension is about to be submitted to
the EC. In any case, the Euromat office has definitely laid the
foundation stone for the familiarization of Greek public servants
with language engineering technology and its actual results. It
encouraged people from public services to learn about how the
recent advances in the field can help them in their everyday work,
facilitating their activities. Opening people's eyes to something
they used to regard with prejudice and occasionally with fear, and
transforming this prejudice into acceptance and enthusiasm has been
a difficult but extremely rewarding task. This interaction between
the developer and the end user has been the key aspect of this
programme. Usually, developers and researchers work in isolation
without ever seeing how users react to their products. Within the
Euromat office, the opportunity has been presented for both
developers and users to get in touch with each other. This way,
developers got to know and "face" the users, while the latter had
the chance to give their feedback and to enjoy the feeling of
having contributed to a system they actually use. Each time a new,
improved translation was given to a user, after his/her feedback
and remarks had been incorporated, both groups -users and
developers- enjoyed the results. Today, a wide range of
enthusiastic users has been established, and their comments are
most encouraging for the continuation of the work.
By Soula Fourla, and Olga Giannoutsou
Euromat Office
Institute for Language and Speech Processing Athens