An open-source highly scalable web service architecture for the Apertium machine translation engine

Abstract

Some machine translation services like Google Ajax Language API have become very popular as they make the collaboratively created contents of the web 2.0 available to speakers of many languages. One of the keys of its success is its clear and easy-to-use application programming interface (API) and a scalable and reliable service. This paper describes a highly scalable implementation of an Apertium-based translation web service, that aims to make contents available to speakers of lesser resourced languages. The API of this service is compatible with Google’s one, and the scalability of the system is achieved by a new architecture that allows adding or removing new servers at any time; for that, an application placement algorithm which decides which language pairs should be translated on which servers is designed. Our experiments show how the resulting architecture improves the translation rate in comparison to existing Apertium-based servers.