University of North Texas

The University of North Texas, in collaboration with the Shenzhen Library in China and Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, will use its grant to investigate and evaluate the effective and efficient application of Machine Translation (MT) technologies for providing multilingual information access (MLIA) to digital collections. Currently, multilingual digital collections rely primarily on human translation to convert metadata records, which is both time consuming and expensive. The project will produce an MLIA model and an open source multiengine machine translation system able to provide Chinese and Spanish translation of English metadata records. In an increasingly global knowledge society, machine translation is a promising tool for information sharing and knowledge discovery.