This presentation is a part of the MosesCore project that encourages the development and usage of open source machine translation tools, notably the Moses statistical MT toolkit. MosesCore is supported by the European Commission Grant Number 288487 under the 7th Framework Programme. For the latest updates, follow us on Twitter - #MosesCore

1. TAUS OPEN SOURCE MACHINE TRANSLATION SHOWCASE
Using Moses To Win Business That Would Otherwise Be
Lost. Two Practical Use Cases at AVB Translations
10:00-10:20
Wednesday, 17 October
Joël Sigling
AVB Translations

2. Joël Sigling
Director Technology &
Business Partners
Using Moses to win
business
that would otherwise be lost
TAUS OPEN SOURCE MACHINE TRANSLATION SHOWCASE
Seattle, 17 October 2012
©AVB Translations , 2012

3. AVB Translations background
• Amstelveens Vertaalburo: founded 1972 – traditional, high-quality agency
• Translation World: founded 2002, tech-savvy all-round player
• Merger in 2010 >> AVB Translations: premium brand with strong tech focus
• Top 5 player in The Netherlands, 2011 turnover € 4.6 million
• Core business: general translations – legal, financial, technical, …
New branch: Single Language Vendor Dutch for global MLVs

4. History of MT interest
• Member of TAUS since 2008, 1st round table Amsterdam
• Visited TAUS User Conferences in US since 2009
• Sense of urgency developed, merger distraction 2010
• Action in 2011 after merger
• 2011: Our own choice: Dutch <> English legal domain engine
• 2012: At customer request, tourism engines English > X languages
• Why SMT, why Moses? Quicker, cheaper, similar quality (shows research)

5. Case 1: Legal domain engine
• Legal translations about approx. 40% of AVB business, 80% Dutch <>English
• Not the obvious choice: people said MT wouldn’t work for legal: sentences
too long, material to intricate
• Statistical MT suited to non-stylistic materials: eg legal
• If this works, we can make MT happen for all other domains

6. Legal engine: Objectives
• Increased productivity, no BLEU % target, but tangible, practical results.
How much extra can a translator do when compared to HT?
• Tool to offer usable quality with very quick turnarounds for high volume
(typical “Friday afternoon lawyer requests”)
• Becoming an MT front runner in the non-localization sector for Dutch
(5th language in Europe after FIGS)

7. Legal engine: Development
• Choice between in-house and external development
• In-house: control, developing expertise, lower long-term cost
• External: lower initial cost, much more expertise > best for now
• Our pre-requisites for development option
• ownership and free access to engine
• assurance data will not be used or copied by builder
• Acceptable costs for development & usage
• Skilled partner > AsiaOnline, CrossLang, Pangeanic, LetsMT,
SmartMate??
• CrossLang > all of the above, closest to our office, independent

8. Legal engine: Input data
• Highest quality AVB Dutch <>English legal translations: approx.
700k words per language. Predominantly civil law.
• Not fully reviewed AVB TM, still high-quality: approx. 10 mi.
words per language. Predominantly civil law.
• Legal translations harvested by CrossLang, more diverse legal
material: 7 mi. words per language

9. Legal engine: Initial test results
Various productivity tests done in CrossLang and TAUS
productivity assessment tools (very similar):
productivity between 5% and 20% higher
for post-ediding than human-only output. These results both for
very experienced legal translator and translation novice (intern).
Encouragement to continue…

10. Legal engine: Results in practice
• Live rush ranslations done in first few weeks for new customers:
• 1,500 word trial done for law firm needing high volume in
very short time. Post-edited in 75 minutes. Customer happy
with quality/price ratio.
• 25,000 words in two days with light PE effort by two post-
editors. Quality estimate 80-90% of human translation.
• 4,500 words in 3 hours with almost full PE effort by one
post-editor. Quality estimate >90% of human translation
• 15,000 words in one day, done by two post-editors. Quality
estimate 80-90% of human translation

11. Legal engine: more success
• Other successes:
• 7 documents translated and post-edited this way in one
court-case. Customer very happy, case won!
• Three new customers secured through the fact that we
were able to turnaround a large volume in a very short time.
•
• Some customers are ordering this type of translation in
stead of normal translation even with normal deadlines.
• Sales department have a new USP to sell to our legal
customers. Interest is growing!

12. Case 2: Hotel booking engine
SITUATION
• Big (4 million words) hotel booking site, partly available in 10
languages
• Booking funnel fully and best-selling hotels largely translated
Customer ambition:
• Have all 4M words translated & do more languages
BUT
• No budget for full human translation/post-editing
• Google too expensive and risk of being considered duplicate
content at some point in the future

13. Booking engine: AVB solution
• Combination of TM & MT to translate all content & differentiate in
quality where necessary
• Build up new TMs for “new” languages and use TM from “old”
languages to create dataset for engines with harvested material
• Customer to get any TM matches for free after paying for initial
baseline (20,000 words)
• Engine development paid for, but throughput almost free

14. Booking engine: Challenges
• Getting traction within client DMT (took two years)
• Finding enough relevant data to build a decent engine (classic)
• Deciding on KPIs from the customer: when would it be successful?
• Technical: getting workable data in and out of customer CMS

15. Booking engine: Results
• Two languages chosen for trial: French and Polish
• Baseline TM built for these, all website TM matches replaced for
French and Polish. Has already save customer thousands of euros.
• Two Moses engines built by TauYou as trial: French and Polish
• 1st Polish engine results were put on line as test, bookings increased
in spite of poor initial language quality
• Customer has approved four more engines: Dutch, French, German,
Spanish and Italian

16. Business conclusions
• We are already making money on MT. All investments paid back in
half a year.
• Extra turnover forecast thanks to legal engine: EUR 50,000+ in
2013 + EUR 20,000 in cost savings (bottom line).
• Turnover forecast for TM+MT solution for hotel booking site in
2013: anywhere between EUR 50,000 and 200,000.
FOR AVB, MT IS A GOOD INVESTMENT!

17. Phone: +31 20 645.66.10
Mobile: +31 625.025.475
E-mail: joel.sigling@avb.nl
Twitter: @JoelAVB
Adres: Ouderkerkerlaan 50
1185 AD Amstelveen
The Netherlands
Website: www.avb.nl