The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2020 - 34

RESOURCE REVIEW

BY JOST ZETZSCHE

Talking with the Developer of GT4T

D

allas Cao is the developer of GT4T1,
a little, unobtrusive application
that allows you to connect from
any Windows or Mac application to a
large range of machine translation (MT)
engines. As such, it represents a different
way of accessing MT suggestions from
many of the translation environment
tools within their interfaces, and it also
allows you to access MT suggestions
from within any non-translation-specific
environment. Also, you can use GT4T to
automatically override terminology used
by the MT engines. I talked to Dallas
about the history of the tool, its features,
and his future plans.
Jost: More and more translators use MT
as one of their resources for translation.
Professional translators who are using a
translation environment or computerassisted translation (CAT) tool usually
use an API-based2 connector to a MT
engine that brings the MT suggestions
right into their environment alongside
translation memory matches, term base
suggestions, and other resources. Your
tool, GT4T, deals with MT differently. But
before we get into what it actually does
and how it can be used, tell us a little bit
about GT4T's history and why you chose
to create it in the first place.
Dallas: The original idea of GT4T is
simple. You select a portion of source
text and press a keyboard shortcut, and
the selection is then replaced by Google's
MT translation.
I started working on GT4T for my
personal use as early as 2009, when the
neural MT engine was nonexistent and
MT was little more than a laughingstock.
But I found while MT was almost always
bad at understanding the structure of a
sentence, it could be used to translate
phrases. I wanted to have a tool that
would allow humans to decide and
choose which part of a sentence to be
"translated" by MT on the fly without
disrupting their workflow.
I was a translator who had never
thought of becoming a programmer. If

34

The ATA Chronicle | March/April 2020

I wanted to have a tool that
would allow humans to decide
and choose which part of a
sentence to be "translated" by
MT on the fly without disrupting
their workflow.

suggestions are helpful, they can replace
the original text in the originating
application. Am I correct so far? Do you
want to talk about some other features
that differentiate GT4T?

there had been such a tool then, I would
have been a happy user of it and there
would never have been a GT4T.
The first version of GT4T was written
as a Microsoft Word macro and only
worked in Microsoft Word. I was excited
to find that it was even more useful than
I had initially thought, and very soon
the idea of selling it came to my mind.
There are always phrases that human
translators know MT will certainly do
well with, like a list of country names.
Using GT4T would simply save some
keystrokes. With time, that alone would
be a huge productivity gain.
To make a long story short, the spirit of
entrepreneurship is to continually push a
simple idea forward and see how far it can
go. With some twists and turns, GT4T has
grown in features and translation quality.
As MT gets better, GT4T automatically
gets better too! I have also grown into a
confident programmer.

GT4T also offers special shortcuts
that allow you to automatically
translate segments in a CAT tool like
SDL Trados Studio or memoQ. You can
hit a shortcut to translate the current
segment or several segments. The
shortcuts work in a long list of CAT
tools, including web-based ones like
Smartling and Crowdin.
Other than MT engines, GT4T also
helps access various online dictionaries
in the same fashion-without having
to leave your working environment or
open a browser window. You can use
a shortcut to submit your selection
simultaneously to several online
dictionaries, glossaries, or terminology
sites like the Interactive Terminology
for Europe (the EU's terminology
database), Microsoft Glossary, or the
terminology collection at Proz.com.
GT4T goes one step further than similar
tools like IntelliWebSearch. Instead of
automatically opening the webpages,
GT4T collects the dictionary results and
displays them in a pop-up window. The
user can pick a translation and hit Enter
to insert it into the document in which
they are working.

Let's talk about the tool itself. It
runs on Windows and Mac and
gives access to Google Translate (either
the neural or the statistical MT engine),
Microsoft Translator, DeepL Pro,
Yandex, and a variety of Chinese-based
providers, including Baidu, Youdao,
Tencent, Sogou, CloudTranslation, and
NiuTrans. The user can select which
engines-and which language
combination-they want to use, and
upon highlighting text in any
application and pressing a keyboard
combination, the result(s) is displayed
in a pop-up window. If any of the

One interesting feature of GT4T
you didn't mention is the custommade glossary that automatically
replaces terms in the MT suggestions. I
assume that it's particularly valuable for
languages with no morphology, like
Chinese. What about languages with
rich morphology (which I assume will
result in a lot of missed replacements)?
Can the user apply some kind of
wildcard to find morphological variants?
And is there a way to accommodate
things like gender and possible
automatic replacement of articles
or pronouns?

J

D

J

www.atanet.org
http://www.Proz.com http://www.atanet.org
The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2020

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