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Experiences with Greek users of Machine Translation
The second year things ran more smoothly as a relatively steady number of users was reached, and this in spite of the frequent transfer of officials, which meant that the whole information procedure had to start all over again every time the head of a department changed. During the third year, most EC-SYSTRAN requests came from regular users, an additional person was hired to deal with the preparation of documents for translation (ie scanning, typing etc), and generally the activities of the office settled into a “routine” procedure. The development of the system is being continued according to the particular needs of the Greek public sector and users of the system are becoming more and more familiar with the concept of machine translation.
A happy ending? That will depend on whether or not the Office survives. Since the beginning of 1998, the whole project has been incorporated within a new EC framework (MLIS) and, at the time of writing, the proposal for an extension is about to be submitted to the EC. In any case, the Euromat office has definitely laid the foundation stone for the familiarization of Greek public servants with language engineering technology and its actual results. It encouraged people from public services to learn about how the recent advances in the field can help them in their everyday work, facilitating their activities. Opening people’s eyes to something they used to regard with prejudice and occasionally with fear, and transforming this prejudice into acceptance and enthusiasm has been a difficult but extremely rewarding task. This interaction between the developer and the end user has been the key aspect of this programme. Usually, developers and researchers work in isolation without ever seeing how users react to their products. Within the Euromat office, the opportunity has been presented for both developers and users to get in touch with each other. This way, developers got to know and “face” the users, while the latter had the chance to give their feedback and to enjoy the feeling of having contributed to a system they actually use. Each time a new, improved translation was given to a user, after his/her feedback and remarks had been incorporated, both groups —users and developers— enjoyed the results. Today, a wide range of enthusiastic users has been established, and their comments are most encouraging for the continuation of the work.