Chinese – Portuguese Translation Oriented Interactive Input Method (IME) System

Abstract

In last year, UM-iMethod was released, it is an advanced Interactive Machine Translation (IMT) system integrated with the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system in order to provide a fresh and effective way to those bilingual translators to produce target translated text. However, UM-iMethod recently focuses on Chinese and English bilingual translation and still have some shortages. Therefore, we make some refinements on UM-iMethod and propose the UM-iMethod2. As Macau was previously colonized by Portugal, Macau acts as an important bridge between Portuguese-speaking countries and China. It is not only that Portuguese is frequently used in Macau, more and more co-operation opportunities between China and Portuguese-speaking countries are depending on Macau. Thus, it creates an enormous number of Portuguese and Chinese documents that need to be translated into each of these languages. It is an unpredictable workload that professional translators are assigned to accomplish such huge amount of translations. Due to the unacceptable quality of immature automatic machine translation system, most of the translators prefer to produce the target translation from scratch, rather than to modify those full of mistakes translations. So we decide to develop and integrate a Portuguese-Chinese translation module into the UM-iMethod to assist the translators to produce Portuguese-Chinese translation in an efficient and effective way with acceptable quality. Although UM-iMethod2 is based on the UM-iMethod system, there still have a lot of modification work to the UM-iMethod, in order to achieve the Chinese - Portuguese translation task in UM-iMethod2. It is, in particular, the tense predication module (Each Portuguese verb has 78 different verb conjugations).