Machine Translation of Legal Information and Its Evaluation

摘要

This paper presents the machine translation system known as TransLI (Translation of Legal Information) developed by the authors for automatic translation of Canadian Court judgments from English to French and from French to English. Normally, a certified translation of a legal judgment takes several months to complete. The authors attempted to shorten this time significantly using a unique statistical machine translation system which has attracted the attention of the federal courts in Canada for its accuracy and speed. This paper also describes the results of a human evaluation of the output of the system in the context of a pilot project in collaboration with the federal courts of Canada.