On-line and off-line translation aids for non-native readers

Twic and TwicPen are reading aid systems for readers of material in foreign languages. Although they include a sentence translation engine, both systems are primarily conceived to give word and expression translation to readers with a basic knowledge of the language they read. Twic has been designed for on-line material and consists of a plug-in for internet browsers communicating with our server. TwicPen offers a similar assistance for readers of printed material. It consists of a hand-held scanner connected to a lap-top (or desk-top) computer running our parsing and translation software. Both systems provide readers a limited number of translations selected on the basis of a linguistic analysis of the whole scanned text fragment (a phrase, part of the sentence, etc.). The use of a morphological and syntactic parser makes it possible (i) to disambiguate to a large extent the word selected by the user (and hence to drastically reduce the noise in the response), and (ii) to handle expressions (compounds, collocations, idioms), often a major source of difficulty for non-native readers. The systems are available for the following language-pairs: English-French, French-English, German-French, German-English, Italian-French, Spanish-French. Several other pairs are under development.