Gaumont - Case Study

Leveraging Gaumont's Film Assets

The French company Gaumont began life as la Société des Etablissements Gaumont in 1906 with an ambition to capture real life on film. It is therefore the longestlasting of any of the film companies created in the heroic years of the film industry. By combining its own holdings with those of another newsreel company, Eclair, Gaumont has one of the richest collections of French newsreel content on record, covering every aspect of French political, social, cultural and sports history from 1895 to 1980.

The company's entire visual treasure trove contains some 90,000 reels of Gaumont newsreels, as well as over 10,000 km (6,000 miles) of French film stock, and 6,000 hours of fiction films, as well as a vast collection of 10,000 still photographs. The vital newsreel material ranges from colored footage using a process developed by Léon Gaumont of the 1918 victory parade at the end of WWI to the Tour de France in 1980.

Today, these film assets contribute greatly towards enriching media products such as documentary and advertising films, multimedia products, museum presentations and online cultural events. As such they create a vital source of new business. A sequence of newsreel lasting just a few seconds can cost several thousand dollars, thus establishing the global market for newsreel film assets a multimillion-dollar business.

Due to the linguistic nature of its catalogue data, Gaumont's major market has until recently been France and French speaking cultures from Quebec to Switzerland. Traditionally, producers in search of material would have to spend time traveling to an archive site and searching through the records to find relevant content. The arrival of the Web has now created an ideal platform for trading between searchers and film asset providers, making it imperative for Gaumont to make its catalogue available online to media buyers in the most accessible idiom - global English.

The Gaumont Database

In 1987, Gaumont took the momentous decision to digitize its catalogue of newsreel products in the form of a database. With three people working full time, the task took ten years, and involved the scanning in and checking of some 120,000 text articles originally kept in notebooks describing the content of each film or newsreel sequence. As the Gaumont Cinématique Manager Manuela Padoan in charge of the project recalls, "in some case this meant actually inputting the content of handwritten entries over 100 years old."

Once the catalogue database was completed, Gaumont then began to digitize a considerable number of the actual newsreels so that media researchers could visualize the contents of a brief sequence before deciding whether to purchase. This in turn amplified the appeal of the service for potential buyers.

Then came the vital question: what is the fastest and most cost-effective way to translate the collection of catalogue articles - containing a total of 14 million words or 104 million characters - into English, thereby opening the holding to the global media market?

Figuring Out Translation

The catalogue articles describing each newsreel vary in length and content, of course, but they include a large quantity of repeated words and abbreviations, a vast number of proper names of statesmen, politicians, sports people, actors, and people in the news, that naturally were not to be translated, together with a number of 'index' phrases without context that indicated the general topic of the film sequence.

Gaumont calculated that if they had asked a translation team to work on this entire base of articles, the job would have taken at least 10 person years, and demanded extensive coordination and quality management requirements. Moreover, given the summary and repetitive nature of the descriptions, consistent quality over 120,000 documents would have been particularly demanding for human translators.

To complicate matters even further, Gaumont's staff are constantly updating the articles themselves, adding further information about the content of each newsreel sequence after visualization to increase the relevance of the database for searchers. For example, a newsreel originally made to cover a fashion show in 1935 turned out to include as-yet unnoticed footage of the famous French actress Michelle Morgan. The chosen translation solution therefore had to be flexible enough to handle this constantly updated information, in addition to the original content.

Given the volume of translation, the fact that the source documents were all in digital format, and the need to avail the translated version available for information searching purposes rather than for elegant reading as soon as possible, Gaumont opted for a machine translation solution that exploited the power of the computer to provide an adequate response to these needs. They contacted SYSTRAN, who were able to deliver a complete translation of the 14 million words in just nine months.

The SYSTRAN Solution

SYSTRAN set up a seven-person team of computational linguists and software engineers that also included a project manager, who began by examining the Gaumont corpus of French texts, analyzing the quality and evaluating the work that would be needed to transform the raw French material into a machine tractable source text. They then worked with the Gaumont team - the project manager, archivist, network administrator and translator - to test their developing translation solution and fine-tune it to Gaumont's specific needs.

First the computer files containing the database were enhanced by the removal of typographical errors, spelling variants for the same expressions, and irrelevant markers. A standardized approach was adapted to displaying dates, French cultural terms and especially family names to avoid unwanted English translations of certain French proper nouns. All the information on the quality of the source texts were fed back to the Gaumont team. For example, around 100,000 spelling errors were corrected in the source text.

From the linguistic point of view, metrics were developed to measure the occurrence of potentially ambiguous French terms, phrases and idioms, and the exact nature of the short, verbless sentences that occur in many of the articles. At the same time, the SYSTRAN team collaborated with the Gaumont archive team and translator on developing a series of additional dictionaries to augment SYSTRAN's standard French-English dictionaries. These specific dictionaries (with over 110,000 entries) cover such word types as Patronyms, Names, Toponyms, Cinema terms, and Film Titles.

When all of these resources had been developed and applied to the automatic translation process, they delivered 80% comprehension during a first evaluation. Subsequent work was devoted to enriching the dictionaries and fine-tuning the specific tools required to improve translation quality to Gaumont's desired standard.

Example of the Machine Translation of a Typical Newsreel Article

Note that the input error - 'pours' instead of 'pour' - in the French text is left untranslated in the English version, since 'pours' is already a meaningful word in English, though obviously not in this context.

About the Author

Andrew Joscelyne is a Paris-based language industry consultant and writer who has tracked translation and other language technology solutions for a number of publications. He has been editor of Language Industry Monitor and LE Journal, and works on awareness-raising projects in language technology issues for the European Commission.

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