Association for Machine Translation in the Americas Opens Its Conference Doors to Public to Showcase the Wonders of Automated Translation; Machine Translation Making Definite Inroads beyond Just Government Usage.

STROUDSBURG, Pa. -- At its seventh biennial conference, AMTA 2006 to be held at the Marriott in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Association for Machine Translation in the Americas will open its doors to the public for a free showcase of applications on Thursday, Aug. 10 from noon to 4:00 pm.

Organizers want to introduce the public to the ways in which machine translation (MT) is used in practical, real world applications. The Cambridge/Boston area is a good location for this because it is home to a large number of active translation and related language technology companies and users; the Marriott Hotel is right next to MIT. The showcase is on the second day of the three-day conference, which includes a dedicated track for users of translation to the conference program, in addition to its established research track. The URL for the conference is http://amta2006.amtaweb.org/index.htm.

Automated translation, using computers to translate human languages, has been a goal of the information technology industries practically since computers began. Traditionally the government has been an important user and financial backer of these technologies. In recent years, there have been great strides made in both machine translation technology and in the usage of it in applications that can aid communications among cultures, facilitate global business and support specific industrial, educational or government applications.

Laurie Gerber, the president of AMTA (who is also a vice president of business development at Language Weaver), said, "We thought this would be a good opportunity for students, business people and even consumers to see what amazing progress is being made in the machine translation industry. The showcase gives them an opportunity to see that it's 'ready for primetime' and is already being used in interesting ways such as monitoring of foreign language broadcasts, real-time spoken and typed chat communication, and information search of global documents."

Showcased applications and their presenters include: Foreign language broadcast/video monitoring (BBN, Virage), cross-language search (Apptek, Mitre), document exploitation (CACI, NovoDynamics, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center), translation for real time communication (Spoken Technologies, Mitre), and general and special purpose machine translation systems, MT portals, and associated tools (Apptek, Basis Technologies, Center for Applied Machine Translation, LanAConsulting, Language Weaver, LEC, Sakhr, Systran and Max Planck Institute).

About AMTA

AMTA is an association dedicated to bringing together researchers, developers and users interested in the translation of languages using computers in some way. This includes people with translation needs, commercial system developers or integrators, scientists, sponsors, and people studying, evaluating, and understanding the science of machine translation and educating the public on important scientific techniques and principles involved. AMTA has members in Canada, Latin America, and the United States. More info is available at http://amtaweb.org/index.html.