With the support of the French Ministry of Culture and the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and in partnership with the Académie des Sciences, the centre Mersenne has developed a semi-automatic translation tool for scientific articles.
This tool enables volunteer contributors to start translating published scientific articles into the language of their choice, using a machine translation tool to generate translations of published articles, using machine translation post-editing.
Promoting the multilingual dissemination of scientific articles
This tool has been developed so that each author can write an article in his/her native language, without this being an obstacle to its international distribution, as it can be easily translated.
Whatever its original language, an article can be translated into a wide variety of languages (for the moment, only languages based on the Latin alphabet).
Moreover, an article written in a quality language generates a quality translation.
How does it work?
To translate an article, a contributor follows the steps below:
1- Select the article to be translated and the target language.
2- Start the pre-translation of the article using MateCat (computer-assisted translation tool).
3- Post-edits the pre-translation (checks, corrects and improves) generated by a generative translation solution.
If necessary, he translates the metadata if the translation has not been provided by the author
4- Submit the translation to the editorial team of the journal from which the original article was published.
5- If the translation is accepted, it will be published under a CC BY 4.0 licence, in HTML and PDF versions, on the journal’s website. The name of the contributor will be displayed as the author.
The tools we use
The Traduction solution is based on MateCat, an open-source computer-assisted translation (CAT) software package. Celui-ci propose des traductions automatiques via le moteur de traduction ModernMT qui va puiser indifféremment dans différents outils de traduction en ligne (Deepl, Google Translate…) pour générer une traduction contextualisée, qui tient compte de l’intégralité du texte de l’article.
Technical constraints (temporary)
Currently, the translation tool only applies to articles published in the Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des sciences, which have full text, i.e. Geoscience, Chemistry and Biology.
Eventually, the translation tool could be extended to all the centre Mersenne journals.
Project background
See Project presentation.
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