1.5 Liaison Activities

MOLTO plans to establish contact with related projects in machine translation such as EuroMatrix and T4ME to organize joint meetings in the future. Initial discussions with members of these projects have taken place during LREC 2010, last May. Initial communication with representatives of EuroMatrix has taken place during LREC2010 and identified as common interest the development of hybrid translation systems. UPC is a partner both to MOLTO and to the FAUST - Feedback for User adaptive Statistical Translation project. The ICT-FY project HATS: Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models has approached MOLTO to discuss possible future cooperation in the area of translation between formal and informal software specifications. The project ATLAS, ATLAS (Applied Technology for Language-Aided CMS), is another EU project whose aims are similar to MOLTO. We will monitor their work to evaluate possible overlaps and areas of cooperation.

Furthermore, as a research and technology development project, MOLTO is entitled to join META-SHARE, an effort to setup a pool of language resources and technologies. META is the Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance network, see http://www.meta-net.eu.

A number of personal contacts and email communication has already taken place during this first trimester. Here below a short summary aimed at giving an overview of what target group is interested in the project's results.

• Ralf Steinberger, European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC) IPSC - GlobeSec - OPTIMA (OPensource Text Information Mining and Analysis) [...] We (the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission) collect, cluster and categorise a daily 100,000 news articles per day in 50 languages, and we perform a whole lot of text mining applications on 20 of them, including novel things such as cross-lingual topic tracking for all language pairs and the automatic merging of name variants across many languages and scripts. Have a look at http://emm.jrc.it/overview.html, and especially at NewsExplorer (http://emm.newsexplorer.eu/)[...]I will be at LREC[...]
• Flora Muir LLM, Grant & Project Director WHICHMUIR CONSULTING Ltd I represent and act as project coordinator for a group of organisations who are both enterprises and Educational Institutions and Professional Regulators in 6 different countries who are very interested in developing a Transfer of Innovation project. [...]Some of the sectors involved are legal work based education & qualification and information systems, Wine & spirits/ hospitality work based education & qualification.These organisations are already working together on developing standard cross border /language materials under the Lifelong learning programme (LLP) Cross border multilingual work based education, training and information systems of both professionals and consumers of their services are at the heart of the project objectives. We would be very pleased to discuss with you the potential of the Molto project, current capacities to participate in developing and informing our group objectives and how your organisation (s) might be able to work with us in future to develop mutual capabilities.
• Brian McConnell, Worldwide Lexicon Project http://www.worldwidelexicon.org WWL (www.worldwidelexicon.org) is an open source translation memory that combines inputs from machine, volunteer and professional translation services, and provides developers with a simple standards based web API to interact with the system. First, I'd be interested in supporting MOLTO as an MT service. If you have a web API, we can easily build a connector to it, so that users can easily request translations without having to implement different protocols for different MT engines, a big problem at present. We work with a number of MT engines including Google, Moses, Apertium, Language Weaver, and are adding more in the near future. I'd be glad to implement this for you. It takes a few hours to add new MT engines in most cases. Second, our translation corpus is open content, so as we collect user edited translations and professional translations, we archive these and are making them available to researchers. The corpus is currently at about a million sentences (mostly English Arabic), but should grow significantly as we roll out new services, such as our Word Press plugin that enables machine and professional translation for Word Press blogs. [...]
• Paraskevopoulos Spyros European Mobility, http://www.geniusmobility.eu I recently read about the project you coordinate, called “Molto”. I am interested to be informed on a regular basis about its results, as I think it might prove useful to a lot of individuals in the E.U. Please add me to any newsletter lists if there are any.
• Christian Fraunholz, www.php10.de, I am working as a web developer since 1999. Today I heared of the MOLTO project...will it be possible to use the translator in PHP as a web service?
• Patrizia Biani Country Coordinator - European Affairs - Member States Co-op. - Dir. 5.1.5.1 European Patent Office, As an initiative of general European interest, the European Patent Office (EPO), in co-operation with the national patent offices of the member states, intends to set up language technology services for patents for European languages, so to enable the users of the patent system to access, disseminate and work with multi-lingual patent information. We are currently preparing the phase of collecting the patent corpora existing within the EPO and in the local patent offices, which is planned to start in the 3rd quarter of 2010. The collected corpora should enable a proper training of one or more translation engines to be defined. At present we have established contacts with the PluTO project. However, we are keen to follow all relevant initiatives in this area, so to be able to provide the highest quality translation for patents in a continuative way, keeping pace with the evolution of technology. The MOLTO research project is certainly one of great interest for us. We should be very pleased if we could be in touch and, in any case, you could keep us informed on the developments and results.
• Henk Becker, I have designed and tested a system for multilingual communication.[...] My system is called Sociolinguafranca. It is possible to use it for communication in two or three languages at the same time. It can be used without and with machine translation. If machine translation is applied, two types can be used. The first type is a closed system, applying terms and sentences already translated, controled and stored in a digital archive. The second type is a half-closed system based on a general translation system, like Babylon. In a half-closed system, mistakes are to be found. [...] Sociolinguafranca is a registered trademark. It has been registered by the Utrecht Centre for Applied Sociology Ltd. I use UCAS Ltd for continuing my work in science since my retirement. For details see: www.ucas.nl. I am convinced that your MOLTO project could profit from integrating my system. If you would be interested in looking for opportunities for some kind of cooperation, I am prepared for a discussion, for instance by video conferencing.
• Ana González Escudero, Murcia City Council, in South-East Spain, is preparing its candidature for the European Capital of Culture event in 2016. Our programme will include a section on languages, and more specifically about multilinguism and translation. That is why we are very interesting in knowing more of the MOLTO translation tool you are developing, and would like to know if you would consider to explain its functioning in Murcia at a later stage. [...] we are preparing Murcia's candidature (cultural programme overview) for the European Capital of Culture event in 2016. Just an overview, but already connecting Murcia to cultural institutions in Europe. For the language section, we would like to design an event about multilinguism together with our university (Translation and interpreting degree) and other universities in Europe, and we would be delighted to include conferences about innovative projects like yours. At this stage you don't need to do anything but say if you would consider to come to Spain for a conference in that framework.
• Anton Cpin, Technical Team Lead, Jonckers Translation & Engineering Our company with head office in Brussels is specializing in Localization, Internationalization and Translation services and is one of only four Premier Vendors worldwide performing product localization for the Microsoft Corporation, CISCO, Adobe, HP, Canon. For expanding our business activity to meet market demand and to optimize our internal processes, we are looking into all kind of Technologies and one of our priorities today is also Machine translation. During our research we have found this emergent and promising MOLTO project. Therefore I am writing you this letter to ask for information about possible MOLTO project partnership and cooperation.
• Sophie Oestreich, Junior Marketing Manager, http://www.tolingo.de thank you very much for the information about your project. I would be pleased if you kept me informed about the progress of MOLTO. Please take a look at our website www.tolingo.com. As we also work on tools to make the job of the translators more easy and fluent, let me know if you could imagine any way of cooperation.