Lugar: Hall 6, auditorio del pabellón de España

Viernes 5, de 10:30 a 10:50 

Ponente: Fernando Moreno-Torres Camy - Director comercial de BERCA Translator

Resumen: VICTOR Translator es un traductor automático de documentos de inglés a español. Se trata de un producto revolucionario ya que es el mejor programa de traducción (entre estos dos idiomas) del mundo. Tras 6 años de diseño y 4 de desarrollo hemos conseguido un programa que obtiene unos resultados de una calidad desconocida hasta ahora, muy por encima del resto de programas de traducción actuales. Es un producto especialmente atractivo para empresas españolas con necesidad de un volumen alto de traducción de inglés a español y para empresas anglo parlantes con mercado en el mundo hispano.

Granada, Spain, Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Industry heavyweights—including companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft--have a surprise in store for them at the 2010 CeBIT trade fair in Hannover, Germany the first week in March. MTC Soft, a tiny—15 employees--Spanish software firm will be challenging their primacy in automatic translation from English into Spanish with VICTOR Translator, a ground-breaking new product.

This new machine translator, which debuted in Barcelona last October, aroused a lot of interest in translation circles due both to its innovative approach to the problem and to its sparkling results. “What was clear from the beginning,” says Fernando Moreno-Torres, MTC Soft’s CEO, “was that nobody had achieved a level of translation from English to Spanish sufficiently exact for professional use, and to do so would require a fresh analysis of the problem.” 

That “fresh analysis” came from a 20-year-veteran translator from the European Commissionin Brussels. “She had worked with all the most important machine translators,” says Moreno-Torres, “and was intimately acquainted with their strengths and weaknesses. That specific experience in the field, coupled with her professional formation in linguistics, permitted her to create a totally new approach to the problem, an outline which made everything possible. The secret lay in a previous linguistic analysis of the text. Based on this fresh start, our programmers were able to come up with the breakthrough. In the end their solution entails submitting each word of the text to 180 parsing and analysis routines. The whole development process took nearly 10 years.” 

Does this mean we now have a human-quality translator for professional use? “Not quite yet,” says the MTC Soft director, “but we’re getting a lot closer. With an effectiveness index of 95%--and rising--the translations done by VICTOR require a minimum of revision and represent a highly-viable commercial proposition today.”

What’s so unique about VICTOR Translator? “The answer to that question is simple,” says Moreno-Torres, “VICTOR Translator makes good translations, something not achieved yet by any other English-Spanish automatic translator on the market.” He adds, “The reason that machine translators return so many erroneous and irrelevant results is that they only read the words in the documents translated, not the sense of the words. With its rigorous linguistic analysis approach VICTOR Translator changes all that. Now English-to-Spanish translation clients have access, for the first time, to near-human-quality translations.”   

Paper: Parsalyser, a new tool for improving Internet searches.

Author: Fernando Moreno-Torres Camy (MTC SOFT)

Summary: The amount of information available on Internet is so extense that keyword searches return so many erroneous documents that it makes them ineffective, e specially in cases which use common search terms. A solution to this problem is to “enrich” the texts before indexing them, so as the additional information can be used to elaborate more selective indexes which give search engines greater filtering possibilities. By using an  exhausting linguistic analysis we’ve developed a computer program, PARSALYSER, which effectively labels every word with its linguistic attributes. PARSALYZER achieves this labelling automatically and at a very low computational cost. The texts enriched with this software represent a much more valuable raw material than simple plain text without attributes. They open up a whole set of new possibilities, among them the filtering of Internet searches.

Last October 17 VICTOR Translator was officially presented to the translating community as part of the program of the Machine Translation, Past, Present and Future Conference organized by proz.com in Barcelona.

After four years of development work the academics and translation experts attending the conference could see this new product for themselves discovering that it represents an authentic revolution in machine-translation quality.

In a half-hour presentation Fernando Moreno-Torres, CEO of MTC Soft, explained the most innovative aspects of the new product. Based on an exhaustive linguistic analysis of English texts, the program yields translations which set a new benchmark for automatic translating. The most avid of those present had the opportunity to try the program personally.

Last May 30 we  presented the Beta version of VICTOR Translator, the new English-to-Spanish machine translator which we created for the translation firm, Berca Translator. The presentation took place in the auditorium of the new offices of the Granada Chamber of Commerce with an audience of academics and translation professionals.

The new translator (“VICTOR” for friends) had aroused a lot of interest in professional translation circles due to its innovative approach to creating a new machine translator. Our director, Fernando Moreno-Torres, explained why interest was running so high: “Until now nobody had achieved a machine translator capable of undertaking professional translation work. In order to do so we had to start again from zero with a new analysis of the problem.”

This new analysis came from a professional translator and linguist with more than 20 years’ experience in the European Commission in Brussels. “Her contribution of linguistic analysis was the key to the whole project.” said Moreno-Torres, “permitting us to create an automatic translator which is significantly superior to those that have gone before. We’re talking about results on the order of 95% correct, and rising.”