PROMT Refines Machine Translation for Language Service Providers

Article Details

Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Posted by Donald A. DePalma on March 31, 2010 in the following blogs: Business Globalization, Best Practices, Technology, Translation and Localization
Pages \| \|

PROMT announced the upcoming release of its Language Service Provider 9.0, intended to help translation companies more easily integrate machine translation (MT) into their processes. The announcement highlights the efforts of MT vendors to meet the productivity and quality output needs of language service providers, a mounting concern among LSPs.

Among the 9.0 improvements are:

Networking and collaboration. The new version allows project participants to concurrently share dictionaries and translation memories, potentially speeding up workflows and reducing the number of redundant files.

Support for standards. PROMT can exchange language data with other applications via TMX Level 2 support translation memory import and export, including markup formatting. TBX and OLIF support allow for terminology exchange, a useful function given the uncertain state of the terminology software sector. Finally, it adds XLIFF roundtrip support for integrating with other computer-aided translation (CAT) tools that input and output this format.

Integration. This new release improves integration with internet browsers and Microsoft Office. As with previous PROMT products, its application programming interface (API) can call any module at any level, thus allowing ambitious LSPs to integrate raw or post-processed (aka "post-edited") MT into any of their workflow and applications. The product also introduces PROMT 4TM, a TMX-based function that outputs a PROMT-generated translation memory into TMX format for use with other CAT tools.

Quality refinements. To speed up dictionary creation, this new version offers an automated statistics-based terminology harvester. A tool set lets LSPs create dictionaries, prioritize which ones are applied first, and otherwise manage these assets by client or domain. Finally, PROMT includes QA Lab to measure translation quality and process efficiency.

PROMT's LSP-focused release hits all three of the marks that we flagged in how "Developers Work to Broaden Use of Machine Translation," (Mar10): the ability to configure and refine the engine, tools to measure and improve quality, and integration with common business applications. LSPs looking to include MT in their workflow will be able to add PROMT to their short list of candidate technologies.

Categories