Research Team—Example-based Machine Translation for Legal Text

Researchers from the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics and the Faculty Laboratory Centre were awarded the largest single CERG ($1.5m) in the Humanities, Social Sciences & Business Studies panel to develop an example-based machine translation (EBMT) system for the specialized language of legislation and legal documents. Their timely investigation will help to address the growing demand for bilingual legal texts as Hong Kong converts to a bilingual legal system.

 

Team players and their areas of expertise:

(Photo from left) Dr Jonathan Webster (Principal Investigator)—text linguistics and computational lexicography; Mr Caesar Lun—electronic lexicography and terminology processing; Dr K K Sin—legal translation; Mr Kit Chunyu —machine learning; Mr Vincent Wong—computing and networking technologies; Dr H Pan -- theoretical linguistics and Chinese information processing.

 

Research Method:

Research into the application of the EBMT approach will be based on an aligned parallel corpus of over 35 million words representing the work of top professionals in legal translation.

 

Quotable Quotes:

"Drawing on the expertise of colleagues from the fields of computational linguistics, jurilinguistics, computer science and legal translation, we anticipate this project will produce results which are both academically significant and technologically innovative." Dr Webster.

"The aim at producing a useful tool for the whole legal profession. That's a major reason why we have received strong support from the SAR Department of Justice." Dr Sin.?

Location: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, Blue Zone, 7/F Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong.

 

Contact/Telephone: 2788 8775

 

E-mail: ctjjw@cityu.edu.hk