Integration of term bases in machine translation

The question of how to use a glossary or term base in conjunction with machine translation started to become relevant some years ago. In other words, how do you integrate term bases into machine translation engines to produce output that takes account of glossary terms? Technical options for achieving this have been around for a long time, but they are not particularly easy to implement.

Modern translators work in computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. Most would agree that such tools can be used not only for technical translations, but also for legal work, and even for the translation of literary texts, among many other subjects, since they save a huge amount of time and optimize workflows. And in my opinion, the use of term bases is quite promising for many subject areas.

It is generally believed that CAT is wholly unsuitable for literature or, for example, for marketing materials. Nevertheless, it does make sense to use these tools to the full to help optimize the translation and editing process. Term bases (or glossaries, if in addition to translations of terms, we also include definitions and other comments in them) aid not just with checking and replacing technical terms, but also with verifying proper names and other combinations of characters that occur in texts.

Term base plugins are required for CAT tools when we want to use term bases together with machine translation. In addition, for languages rich in declensions, conjugations, and so on, where inflections and stem words may change, it is also quite difficult to fully integrate term bases with machine translation. This feature is currently available for a very small number of language pairs, and few companies can provide it. The number of companies that have created a plugin enabling this feature to be used in CAT tools is even lower.

In our company, we are working to implement this feature as widely as possible in various ways. We communicate with different companies and use all available tools. We are very interested in collaboration in this sphere. In my experience, everything related to CAT, machine translation, and more has great potential, and can all be developed indefinitely. We are thrilled when our clients, partners, and colleagues are interested in the growth of these technologies and are proactively applying these tools in practice.