Opentrad Apertium open-source machine translation system: an opportunity for business and research

Abstract

Most successful machine translation systems built until now use proprietary software and data, and are either distributed as commercial products or are accessible on the net with some restrictions. This kind of machine translation systems are regarded by most professional translators and researchers as closed and static products which cannot be adapted or enhanced for a particular purpose. In contrast to these systems, we present Opentrad Apertium, an open-source shallow-transfer machine translation engine originally intended for related-language pairs but currently being extended to deal with not so similar pairs. The opportunities offered by open-source software are very interesting in new research projects but they are also promising in business and particularly as a business model for innovative companies. Questions like which is the most suitable license to release open-source software, or how to make it visible are discussed in this paper. Real opportunities for research and business derived from the Apertium machine translation system are presented as well.