Machine Translation at Autodesk

Autodesk's Localization Services department actively uses machine translation. A key element of our machine translation strategy is that we systematically measure the usefulness of MT, be it when it is employed as translation productivity tool or raw as comprehension aid.

This site presents some of our findings and serves as platform for the tests we hold, grouped under the two main themes of productivity and usability.

As a side-product of our machine translation work, this site also offers access to our bilingual corpora, via the NeXLT corpus search and probabilistic dictionary interfaces.

Further links related to MT at Autodesk

• Third Joint Euromatrix+/CNGL workshop at the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission in Luxembourg, on 14th of October, 2011. This workshop is chaired by Dr. Ventsislav Zhechev from Autodesk.
• A Productivity Test of Statistical Machine Translation Post-Editing in a Typical Localisation Context. Article by Mirko Plitt and François Masselot (both Autodesk) published in The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics in 2010.
• Using the Apertium Spanish-Brazilian Portuguese machine translation system for localization. Article by François Masselot, Petra Ribiczey (both Autodesk) and Gema Ramírez-Sánchez (Prompsit) presented at the Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation in 2010.
• Enterprise Innovators – Interview with Autodesk's Mirko Plitt in the August 2011 issue of MultiLingual Computing Magazine.
• TransTips for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max – Machine Translation in Autodesk product tooltips. To find out more, visit Kean Walmsley's Through The Interface blogposts or watch this video:
• And for the MT historians among you, a TIME Magazine article from 2001 about Autodesk's then revolutionary use of raw MT in Product Support articles.