ImTranslator blog

Customizing the Machine Translation system is an effective way to improve machine translation quality for specific usages. There are various ways to customize PROMT translation system.

Use existing specialized dictionaries

PROMT has developed specialized dictionaries that contain special terminology for various subject domains. Attaching appropriate dictionaries to the translation system will tune the translation of a document to a specific subject matter. The order of the attached dictionaries can significantly influence the translation quality.

Not only do specialized dictionaries include special terminology for various subject domains, but also a wide information about the sentence structure for a specific domain.

Create your own user dictionary

PROMT allows users to further customize the translation by adding unknown words to the user-defined dictionary, or by editing the existing entries. The user dictionary can contain words, word combinations, phrases. The user dictionary must be placed on top of the attached dictionary to be the primary dictionary to use, since PROMT looks through the dictionary’s list from top to bottom, the General dictionary being the last to search.

Sample English-French user dictionary entry : a download store = une boutique en ligne (vs. “un magasin de téléchargement”)

Make the list of preserved words

Preserved word is a word (or a word combination) which if marked in the source text as Preserved (Do not translate) won’t be translated. Usually these are proper names, abbreviations and special designations (i.e. Windows XP, Miami Beach, Bill Gates).

Example: I’ve read this article in the Vogue magazine.

No Preservation: Я прочитал эту статью в журнале Моды

Preservation: Я прочитал эту статью в журнале Vogue.

Use word transliteration

Transliteration is the representation of the text using characters of another language.

For example, applying the Transliteration, the Russian name Владимир will be represented as Vladimir.

Use translation rules

Translation rules are a set of functions which allows selecting the models of translating some language constructions which cannot be ruled by modifying the dictionary information.

The translation rules will let you choose between formal / informal language (”you” as “вы”, ” Вы” or “ты”), select the proper gender for the pronoun “I” (male or female), choose British or American English, Portuguese Brazilian or Portugal, and many others.

Use Translation Memory

During the translation the program automatically compares the source text with text fragments from the Translation Memory (AM) databases attached to the translation. In case of complete coincidence the translation of the fragment is being taken from the AM database. You can create your own AM databases if you translate, edit and save the translated sentence/paragraph in the AM database file, or you can use the existing ones - Business or Idioms.

Show translation variants for multi-meaning words

This function lets the users choose the best translation variant for the multi-meaning words. Words with multiple translations are underlined in the text. The system may show additional translations in parenthesis or the first translation in the list.