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Chat your mind (in foreign languages). Instant messaging programs developed by Poznań students double as chat translators.
Source: Głos Wielkopolski, 2007-04-07
Author: Marcin Kostaszuk, Photo: Andrzej Szozda


M.Sc. students of computer science at Poznań's Adam Mickiewicz University have developed Internet messaging programs, DePeDe and Toku-Toku, that come as a major development for Poles who do not know English, Russian or German. Instant messaging programs are software for chatting and exchanging messages over the Internet. The top Polish messenger Gadu-Gadu currently has almost six million users, mostly young, usually using the program for short exchanges.

In Polish to foreigners
The programs developed by the students have one major advantage over Gadu-Gadu - they allow for instant machine translation of Polish texts into other languages and vice-versa. Currently they are working between Polish and English, Russian and German.
Toku-Toku works as an extension to other messengers (currently Gadu-Gadu and ICQ). DePeDe is an independent program. "It's a great tool for such users as international companies whose employees need to exchange information quickly and in a number of languages", says Paweł Perz, a member of the DePeDe team.


Machine plus human editor
The work on DePeDe and Toku-Toku was initiated by Dr. Krzysztof Jassem of AMU's Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. For over 10 years he has worked on Translatica, a machine translation program. This year has brought the fourth edition of the Polish-English version. Last year its publisher started selling the first Polish-Russian version.
"My students' messengers feature a machine translation mechanism, but it is supported by its users, who, as editors, can update the base of words and expressions specific for Internet communication, e.g. popular abbreviations and acronyms", explains Jassem as he shows us the mechanism. "For example, the machine would translate the informal Polish greeting cześć as reverence [a legitimate, but rare equivalent] and an editor can associate it with the more probable English equivalent hi".
You still need to study
So can we give up learning languages, an increasingly expensive undertaking, if only for the needs of writing and internet communication?
"Let's not go too far. One obvious thing is that during personal meetings you can't really look at the computer screen all the time. Moreover, machine translation software is still imperfect - it can't be used for literary translations. They work well, however, with technical texts", says Jassem.
At the moment the team of Poznań computer specialists is working on a computer-aided translation (CAT) tool supposed to facilitate the work of translators with the help of texts stored in a translation memory. A translation memory contains translations verified by a competent person. Fragments of a text, stored in a translation memory, are retrieved if a similar source text appears, and fragments that are not similar are translated by machine translation software. Such pre-translated texts reaches a human translator. His or her task is limited to correcting it.
"This method makes translation much quicker and less expensive", says Krzysztof Jassem.


Both DePeDe and Toku-Toku are available at www.poleng.pl in the Download section. The dowload and the programs are free of charge. On the website you can also test Translatica, Poleng's machine translator.

DePeDe and Toku-Toku authors: from the left Grzegorz Patylnek, team leader Krzysztof Jassem, Anna Błażejewska, Karol Kraśkiewicz, Paweł Perz and Dominik Grala