Granted Patent B2

US 9,747,284 · App. 14/835,783 · Granted Aug 29, 2017

Inventors: James Peter Marciano (Amherst, NH); Dean S. Blodgett (Tewksbury, MA)

G06F17/289G06F17/28G06F17/2836G10L15/26

Abstract

Claims (60)

1. A method for machine translation, comprising:

receiving a source string in a source language, an indication of a target language, and user identification information;

using the user identification information to identify at least one memory with user-specific translation data;

tokenizing the source string, using at least one processor, to produce a tokenized source string comprising at least one unique temporary textual elements associated with corresponding target textual elements during tokenization, wherein tokenizing further comprises:

searching the source string to identify at least one portion of the source string that meet a search criterion;

replacing the identified at least one portion of the source string with a corresponding unique temporary textual element; and

associating each unique temporary textual element with a corresponding target textual element;

obtaining a translated string from a translator, the translated string being at least a partial translation of the tokenized source string and including the at least one unique temporary textual elements; and

generating an output string using at least one processor, the generation comprising replacing the at least one unique temporary textual elements in the translated string with the associated target textual elements.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the user-specific translation data comprises at least one of: glossary data, translation memory data, or source-identification rule data, and the corresponding target textual elements are stored as part of the user-specific translation data or as part of sequestered data associated with the user identification information.

3. The method of claim 2 , wherein:

the glossary data is configured to associate strings in the source language with strings in the target language;

the translation memory data is configured to associate strings in the source language with strings in the target language; or

the source-identification rule data comprises regular expressions for identifying strings in the source language.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein:

the strings associated by the glossary data are words or phrases,

the strings associated by the translation memory data are translation units comprising sentences and grammatically independent translation units,

the user-specific translation data is stored in at least one of: a database, a comma-separated values file, or a translation memory exchange file, and

the at least one temporary textual element is a unique textual or alphanumeric token.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein searching the source string to identify all portions of the source string that meet a search criterion comprises:

searching to identify a match between a string in the glossary data and a portion of the source string;

searching to identify a match between a string in the translation memory data and a portion of the source string; or

applying at least one regular expression of the source-identification rule data to identify any portions of the source string as private information for sequestration.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein searching to identify a match between a string in the glossary data and a portion of the source string ignores at least one of:

semantically insignificant differences between the string in the glossary data and portions of the source string,

the case of the alphabetical characters in the source string, or

hyphenation in the source-string.

7. The method of claim 5 , wherein the sequestered data comprises names, account numbers, addresses and telephone numbers.

8. The method of claim 1 , further comprising a normalization step that comprises:

searching the source string to identify all portions of the source string that meet a first search criterion specified in normalization data associated with the user identification information; and

replacing all identified portions of the source string with corresponding normalized strings specified in the normalization data.

9. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

determining that one or more delimiters are used to indicate the presence of do-not-translate terms or phrases within the source string; and

identifying one or more substrings of the source string that are identified by the one or more delimiters as do-not-translate terms or phrases.

10. The method of claim 1 , wherein the at least one unique temporary textual elements comprises a concatenation of a unique numerical identifier of a normalized length and a randomized numerical string of a normalized length.

11. The method of claim 1 , further comprising training a machine translation engine using bilingual or monolingual training material.

12. A system for machine translation, comprising:

a memory associating a user identifier with user-specific translation data comprising at least one of: glossary data, translation memory data, or source-identification rule data;

a first application executing on a first one or more processors, the first application:

receiving a source string in a source language, an indication of a target language, and the user identifier; and

tokenizing the source string to produce a tokenized source string, wherein tokenizing further comprises:

searching the source string to identify at least one portion of the source string that meet a search criterion;

replacing the identified at least one portion of the source string with a corresponding unique temporary textual element; and

associating each unique temporary textual element with a corresponding target textual element; and

a second application executing on a second one or more processors without access to the user-specific translation data, the second application receiving the tokenized source string and outputting a translated string comprising at least a partial translation of the tokenized source string,

wherein the first application receives the translated string from the second application and generates an output string, the generation comprising replacing the unique temporary textual elements in the translated string with the associated target textual elements.

13. The system of claim 12 , further comprising a user interface for creating or updating one or more of glossary data, translation memory data, or source-identification rule data, the user interface comprising one or more interface elements for creating, updating and deleting regular expressions.

14. A system for machine translation, comprising:

a memory associating a user identifier with user-specific translation data;

a first application executing on a first set of one or more processors, the first application:

receiving a source string in a source language, an indication of a target language, and the user identifier;

normalizing the source string to produce a normalized source string; and

tokenizing the normalized source string to produce a tokenized source string comprising at least one temporary textual elements associated with a corresponding target textual elements during the tokenizing process, wherein tokenizing further comprises:

searching the source string to identify at least one portion of the source string that meet a search criterion;

replacing the identified at least one portion of the source string with a corresponding unique temporary textual element; and

associating each unique temporary textual element with a corresponding target textual element; and

a second application executing on a second set of one or more processors, the second application:

communicating the tokenized source string to a translator application executing on a third set of one or more processors; and

obtaining a translated string from the translator, the translated string being at least a partial translation of the tokenized source string and comprising the at least one temporary textual elements inserted during the tokenizing process,

wherein the first application generates an output string, the generation comprising replacing the at least one temporary textual element in the translated string with the associated target textual element.

Assignments (8)

Continuity (3)