Machine Translation of Online Product Support Articles Using a Data-Driven MT System

Stephen D. Richardson

Abstract: At AMTA 2002, we reported on a pilot project to machine translate Microsoft’s Product Support Knowledge Base into Spanish. The successful pilot has since resulted in the permanent deployment of both Spanish and Japanese versions of the knowledge base, as well as ongoing pilot projects for French and German. The translated articles in each case have been produced by MSR-MT, Microsoft Research’s data-driven MT system, which has been trained on well over a million bilingual sentence pairs for each target language from previously translated materials contained in translation memories and glossaries. This paper describes our experience in deploying this system and the (positive) customer response to the availability of machine translated articles, as well as other uses of MSR-MT either planned or underway at Microsoft.