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Machine Translations of the MyNCRU Personal Learning News
The MyNCRU Personal Learning News is a monthly, web-page, email newsletter published by the Global LearningDivision of NCR Corporation. This newsletter is individually created for each subscriber and contains news items and a calendar of events based on his or her organization, job function, and interest profile. It is designed to keep our employees up-to-date on new learning opportunities at NCR.

Beween June and December 2001 we mailed six issues comprising 17,159 individual copies of this newsletter to the associates who requested it. Included in this number were 1,356 copies that were automatically translated by computer into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. These copies were sent to those assiates who had indicated that they preferred those languages when they registered for our MyNCRU service.

This service is made possible by combining state-of-the-art language translation software from Systran Software Inc. with our NCRU web server.(In the near future we plan to offer this same translation service for the English web pageson the NCRU Online Campus. )

Below are links to examples of one copy of this newsletter for a hypothetical employee, Tom Smith. You can see:

the English original and machine translations into:   1. French,
2. German version,
3. Italian version, and
4. Spanish version.

Please note that all links in this sample newsletter (except the link back to the English original) will not work outside the NCR network. The links point to locations on NCR University and to other sites on the NCR intranet that are protected by our firewall.

Here is an illustration of the process by which these newsletters and their translations are created.

Diagram of Language Translation for Personal Learning News

Here is a short description of each step:

  1. Get user profile: The user profile containing the employee's organization, job function, location, interest profile, and language preference is retrieved from the NCRU User Profile Database.

  2. Build English newsletter: Based on the profile an English version of the Personal Learning News is constructed. Learning news and calendar items are selected from the NCRU News and Calendar Database. The English version of the newsletter is stored on the server.

  3. Request translation: Based on the user's language preference the original newsletter is machine translated into French, German, Italian, or Spanish. The translated version of the newsletter is also stored on the server.

  4. Send translated newsletter: The translated newsletter is sent through the NCR internal email system directly to the designated subscriber.

  5. Read email newsletter: The subscriber downloads the translated newletter from the NCR mail server to their mail reader. If the reader has any questions about the translation, the original English version is only one click away. (It is viewed using an web browser in a pop-up window over the translated copy.)