The University of Macau’s (UM) has officially launched UM-CAT, an online Chinese-Portuguese-English computer aided translation platform. The platform allows professional translators to establish specialised vocabulary sets related to a particular industry, handle large translation projects with a division of labour, track the translation progress, and review the final product. The system can also automatically identify previously used texts. The platform are suitable for individuals, government offices, and companies who need to handle a large amount of multilingual translation tasks in their daily work and will help to improve translation efficiency.

UM-CAT was developed by UM’s Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory (NLP²CT). Apart from its core function, automatic translation, this platform also integrates various functions, including translation memory, terminology management, collaborative translation, and intelligent suggestion of translation segments, which enables it to assist in the various aspects of bilingual or trilingual translation between Chinese, Portuguese and English. Moreover, UM-CAT works in translation/proofreading/typesetting mode, which enables flexible division of labour on a case-by-case basis for easy management of different translation tasks. The system can effectively track the translation progress and review the final product to ensure efficiency, accuracy, consistency, and readability, thereby improving translation efficiency. Compared to previous translation systems and platforms, UM-CAT not only can translate generic texts; it can also translate technical texts in different professional fields.

UM’s NLP²CT has long been involved in machine translation research. The lab has launched various innovation technologies, including the PCT, a Chinese/Portuguese translation system; the Um²T, an online interactive Chinese/Portuguese machine translation system; and the smart translation platform. Earlier, an English-Chinese machine translation system developed by UM received the top three prizes as well as the fifth prize at the constraint English-to-Chinese machine translation campaign organised under the 13th China Workshop on Machine Translation (CWMT 2017). Apart from text translation systems, the lab has also developed a conference simultaneous interpreting system. The system can accurately identify the language being spoken and perform simultaneous interpreting to cater to multilingual conferences. The system is currently being tested and is expected to be put into use in the near future. To learn more about the UM-CAT system or to arrange a trial use of the system, please email to nlp2ct@um.edu.mo.