Getting the Message In: A Global Company’s Experience with the New Generation of Low-Cost, High Performance Machine Translation Systems

Abstract

Most large companies are very good at “getting the message out” –publishing reams of announcements and documentation to their employees and customers. More challenging by far is “getting the message in” – ensuring that these messages are read, understood, and acted upon by the recipients. This paper describes NCR Corporation’s experience with the selection and implementation of a machine translation (MT) system in the Global Learning division of Human Resources. The author summarizes NCR‘s vision for the use of MT, the competitive “fly-off” evaluation process he conducted in the spring of 2000, the current MT production environment, and the reactions of the MT users. Although the vision is not yet fulfilled, progress is being made. The author describes NCR’s plans to extend its current MT architecture to provide real-time translation of web pages and other intranet resources.