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Definitions and differences between : machine translation, machine aided translation, multilingual content management and translation technology.

• Machine Translation(MT): “MT is the application of computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today a number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful for certain specific applications, usually in the domain of technical documentation. In addition, translation software packages which are designed primarily to assist the human translator in the production of translations are enjoying increasingly popularity within professional translation organizations.”
• Machine Aided Human Translation(MAHT): “Techniques that help to increase the productivity of human translators via suitable computational infrastructure, including translation memories, terminology management, partial machine translation, online lexicons, or other techniques that automate parts of the translator's work, such as speech recognition or accelerated typing techniques applied to human translations.”
• Multilingual Content Management (MCM): “MCM system is a powerful, based application for rapidly creating and managing multilingual Web content.  Built on open standard XML, MCM was designed for ease-of-use, flexibility and swift deployment.  MCM offers the only fully integrated solution for enterprise-wide multilingual Web content management.”
• Translation Technology: the translation technology is a concept uses to cover all different kind of translations.

The differences between those three concepts basically consist on the technique they use, nothing else.

The FEMTI report says that “the characteristics of the translation task refers to the information flow indeed for the output, from the point of view of the agent (human or otherwise) who receives the translation”.

The characteristics of the translation task are:

1. Assimilation: “the ultimate purpose of the assimilation task (of which translation forms a part) is to monitor a (relatively) large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in (usually) several languages”.
2. Search : “ The goal of a search process is to identify a set os documents that together can satisfy an information needs.”
3. Functionality: “ The capability of the software product to provide functions which meet stated and implied needs when  the software is used under specified conditions.
4. Fidelity: “Subjective evaluation of the degree to which the information contained on the original text has been produced without distortion in the translation.
5. Dissemination: “The ultimate purpose of dissemination is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization”.
6. Communication: “The ultimate purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage”.

Nowadays it is very important to know about the new technologies because in a future we are going to need it to work and especially for people who is studying English philology. There are some reasons to study the human language technology:

·        Nowadays there is a clearly demand of the new technologies.

·        We would have more chances to find a job.

·        For the people who like working with the computer is a good job because you earn enough money.

·        It is a work especially for the philologers because it’s connected to linguistics.

·        We will have a more complete view of the technologies world.

In conclusion, we have to say that studying human language technology we are not going to lose nothing, so the best thing that we can do is to learn HLT.

“Hans Uszkoreit is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. By cooptation he is also Professor of the Computer Science Department. 

Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. During his time in Austin he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center.  In 1984 Uszkoreit received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas. From 1982 until 1986, he worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, Ca

In 1988 Uszkoreit was appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he became the head of the newly founded Language Technology Lab at  DFKI.

Uszkoreit is Permanent Member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL), Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Past President of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information, Member of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech, Member of the Board of the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), and serves on several international editorial and advisory boards. 

His current research interests are computer models of natural language understanding and production, advanced applications of language and knowledge technologies such as semantic information systems, cognitive foundations of language and knowledge, grammar formalisms and their implementation, syntax and semantics of natural language and the grammar of German.”