The ATA Chronicle - September/October 2022 - 36

RESOURCE REVIEW By Yuri Balashov
MultiTraiNMT: Neural Machine
Translation for Everyone
Neural machine translation (NMT) is on everyone's mind. Its quality has
become stunning, if not frightening, and it continues to improve even
as we speak. Tech giants are investing tremendous amounts of capital
in NMT applications. Language services providers, big and small, are
deploying it in production. And translators are increasingly using it
in their workflow. Indeed, post-editing machine translation (MT) has
become a default modus operandi for many.
D
ue to its end-toend
computational
architecture designed
for deep learning, NMT is
easier to understand than
its predecessor, statistical
MT. But hardcore MT
research remains a privilege
of relatively few. For most
users, MT remains a black
box with often unpredictable
behavior, but thanks to recent
efforts aimed at increasing
MT literacy1
, the situation
has started to change. The
MultiTraiNMT project is a
major step in this direction.
What Is MultiTraiNMT?
Funded by the Erasmus+
program of the European
Union, MultiTraiNMT is a
project specifically intended
" to develop, evaluate, and
disseminate open-access
materials and open-source
applications that will lead to
the enhancement of teaching
and learning about MT
among language learners,
language teachers, trainee
translators, translation
teachers, and professional
translators across Europe. " 2
And not only Europe.
Developed within the past
three years by a team of
experts from the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona,
Universitat d'Alacant,
Université Grenoble-Alpes,
and Dublin City University,
along with Prompsit
Language Engineering and
KantanMT, MultiTraiNMT
invites all interested parties
to join it as partners to:
1. " Use the project
coursebook and associated
activities in their classes. "
2. " Test the MutNMT
educational platform
and activities for
managing NMT engines
for didactic purposes. "
3. " Participate in any other
training and/or research
activity which fosters the
development of MT skills
in general. " 3
Three interrelated
components of the project are
briefly described below.
The Book
Released in July 2022, the
open-access coursebook,
Machine Translation for
Everyone (see links in the
36 The ATA Chronicle | September/October 2022
sidebar on page 39), covers
much ground-from the
technical foundations to
the ethical and broadly
societal implications of MT.
While explicitly intended for
classroom use, the book's
nine chapters, written by
experts in the relevant fields,
are remarkably clear and
accessible to everyone. Each
chapter can be read on its
own and is complete with
ample references to more
specialized literature.
The Activities
There are two types of
activities developed for each
chapter of the coursebook:
1. Self-learning questions
ranging from multiplechoice
to crossword
puzzles and fill-in-theblank
exercises (see
Figure 1 on page 37), with
immediate automatic
feedback for those
learning at their own pace.
2. Open-ended,
customizable teacherguided
mini-projects that
invite readers to reflect
on many interesting
and challenging issues
surrounding MT and write
short essays. (See Figure 2
on page 37.)
There are currently over
200 excellent and thoroughly
prepared activities, and the
authors deserve much praise
for putting them together
with such care to detail,
using the open-source H5P
platform, which allows
users to integrate them
into learning management
systems such as Drupal
or Moodle and publishing
environments such as
WordPress. Translation
instructors may further
adapt the activities to their
needs. And it's a great
self-test, too: if you can
answer most of the questions
correctly, you probably know
a lot about MT!
To appreciate this point,
browse through the questions.
You'll be quizzed on a broad
range of topics-from the
basics of neural networks to
the famous semantic alchemy
of word embeddings, to MT
evaluation metrics such
as BLEU and TER, to the
opportunities and challenges
of adapting a particular
MT engine to a given task,
and of using MT in secondlanguage
learning. If you
discover significant gaps in
your background, read the
book! It has all the answers
and is a very rewarding read
even if you're already familiar
with this material. Among
other things, it tries to offer a
unified perspective on a field
that has become very mosaic.
MutNMT
Deriving its name from
Mut, the mother goddess
of ancient Egypt, MutNMT
is a web application that
allows you to get under the
www.atanet.org
http://www.atanet.org
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