IAEA Symposium on International Safeguards

Lost in Translation: Improving the accuracy of the offline automatic translations of the Additional Protocol declarations.

Not scheduled

5m

M Building (Vienna International Centre)

Wedge Participant Shaping the future of safeguards implementation (SGI) [SGI] Streamlining Information-related Workflows: Small Holders/LOFs and AP Declarations

Description

The States with Additional Protocols (APs) in force are required to submit declarations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) providing the information about all parts of a State’s nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mines to nuclear waste, on quarterly and annual basis. While the majority of the States submit their AP declarations in English, a significant number of countries provide their declarations in Russian, French and Spanish.

Given that the professional translations provided by the staff of the Agency’s Division of Conference and Document Services (MTCD) take time, the Department of Safeguards recognized that there was a potential for efficiency gains in providing the reviewers of AP declarations with a tool performing automatic translations in order to get the general overview of State-supplied information.

This paper describes the results of the collaborative work between the Department of Safeguards, the MTCD, and an external vendor of the automated translation tool on the development of the customized Safeguards-specific dictionary, its integration with the MTCD’s Safeguards-relevant translation memories, and the deployment of the tool within the user interface of the Additional Protocol System (APS).

This project has its special significance in proving the possibility of designing and developing the translation capabilities of APS within the IAEA’s highly secure Integrated Safeguards Environment, which does not allow access to the Internet.

The automated translation tool enables the users to understand the general idea of the State-supplied information as soon as the new declarations have been uploaded to APS. This allows for more efficient prioritization of the requests for the official translation to MTCD and thus contributes towards more effective state evaluation process. The solution developed during this project is flexible enough to be used in the other areas of Safeguards work where quick translations of sensitive documents are required.