  The Swiss avalanche bulletin is produced twice a day in four languages. Due
to the lack of time available for manual translation, a fully automated
translation system is employed, based on a catalogue of predefined phrases and
predetermined rules of how these phrases can be combined to produce sentences.
Because this catalogue of phrases is limited to a small sublanguage, the system
is able to automatically translate such sentences from German into the target
languages French, Italian and English without subsequent proofreading or
correction. Having been operational for two winter seasons, we assess here the
quality of the produced texts based on two different surveys where participants
rated texts from real avalanche bulletins from both origins, the catalogue of
phrases versus manually written and translated texts. With a mean recognition
rate of 55%, users can hardly distinguish between thetwo types of texts, and
give very similar ratings with respect to their language quality. Overall, the
output from the catalogue system can be considered virtually equivalent to a
text written by avalanche forecasters and then manually translated by
professional translators. Furthermore, forecasters declared that all relevant
situations were captured by the system with sufficient accuracy. Forecaster's
working load did not change with the introduction of the catalogue: the extra
time to find matching sentences is compensated by the fact that they no longer
need to double-check manually translated texts. The reduction of daily
translation costs is expected to offset the initial development costs within a
few years.

Computation and Language