Context-aware machine translation for software localization

Abstract

Software localization requires translating short text strings appearing in user interfaces (UI) into several languages. These strings are usually unrelated to the other strings in the UI. Due to the lack of semantic context, many ambiguity problems cannot be solved during translation. However, UI are composed of several visual components to which text strings are associated. Although this association might be very valuable for word disambiguation, it has not been exploited. In this paper, we present the problem of lack of context awareness for UI localization, providing real examples and identifying the main research challenges.