Translating the List of Participants in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games into Japanese

Abstract

In this paper, I report on my experience supporting the production of a translated list of participants in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games using machine translation. Producing translated lists of the participants in Olympic Games events is difficult owing to the size and complexity of the games and the wide variety of participating countries. To address this challenge, I implemented a system to translate the names of specific persons called Tsuduri2021, which consists of a translation dictionary and 208 country-specific transliteration subsystems. Each of these subsystems comprises a transducer operating based on different country-specific models produced by Awase2019. The results of a comparison between the final translated list of participants and the output of the Tsuduri2021 system show that most of the computed results were actually used in the final list, including 90.4% of the full name translations and 94.0% of the single-name translations.