Custom MT

Owned by Damian Rozmiarkowski
Last updated: yesterday at 10:07 am
5 min read

Introduction

Custom MT is an XTM Cloud feature that enables you to connect to a custom MT engine. This can be configured globally, per customer, per project and in a project template.

Specifics

Intento MT

Intento MT is by far the most commonly used custom MT engine that is used by the Custom MT feature.

  1. To configure it, go to Configuration → Settings → Translation → Machine Translation → MT engines → Intento (administrative privileges required!).

  1. Once you select the Intento engine, a configuration window will pop up, where you should insert all the required configuration details.

IMPORTANT!

Some fields will already be filled with predefined values. Keep in mind that these are just template values and not valid data! All the relevant data should be provided to you by Intento Support.

To connect to your MT engine:

  1. Enter a unique MT name for your Intento MT. It can be anything you want.

  2. Enter the Username and Password used to log in to MT. These should be provided to you by Intento Support.

  3. Enter the API Base URL. This is the common string that precedes all other endpoints. This can be left as an empty string. You can configure a separate URL for each endpoint.

  4. Enter your Authentication and Translation endpoint URLs. The Translation endpoint, in particular, should also be confirmed by Intento Support.

  • Authentication endpoint → XTM Cloud sends a token, username and password to the MT service. By default, XTM Cloud will take the token value from the response to authorize subsequent requests.

  • Translation endpoint → This is where we send translation units and receive an identifier (for example, jobId).

  1. In the Batch size field, if required, set a size limit for a single batch, .

  2. Enter the Check status endpoint. This endpoint uses the identifier to check a translation unit’s translation status. If an error, or information about cancellation, is returned, the process is interrupted. If a success message is returned, XTM Cloud will try to download the translation.

  3. In the At intervals of [...] seconds field, specify the time intervals at which the translation status is to be checked.

  4. Enter your Download translation endpoint URL. This is for payload parsing and transferring received translations to XTM Workbench in the form of MT matching.

  5. Choose Custom fields (which are configurable for each MT engine).

  6. Optionally, enter a Custom fields prefix (to distinguish custom field metadata sent off for MT processing from other metadata).

  7. Finally, click Add.

Custom MT configuration

The second action is configuration of new MT engines, using the Custom MT feature.

  1. In this case, to perform configuration, go to Configuration → Settings → Translation → Machine Translation → MT engines → Custom MT (administrative privileges required!).

  1. A new popup window is displayed. In it, fill all the required fields.

The fields for a Custom MT are the same as in the case of Intento. For details, see the Intento MT section.

The two documents attached below contain very useful information about the Custom MT feature.

The first one is the Custom MT documentation:

The second documentation contains examples of different possible configurations and responses. Generally speaking, each endpoint can be customized to fit different needs, which is important to remember.

Below are explanations of some important keywords found in the configuration:

  • payload → Translation request payload sent to a translation endpoint.

  • payloadSegmentTemplate → Definition of the structure specifying how segments are sent for translation, represented by the segments variable in the payload.

  • extractionConfiguration → How XTM Cloud reads the response returned from an MT provider.

  • responseVariableExpressions → Variables we expect in a response from the MT service.

  • errorDetectionConfig → Defines what error XTM Cloud will report in our logs when the MT provider responds with an error status.

Configuration levels

Once Custom MT has been enabled globally, you can also customize the MT setup for specific customers [Customers → (select a customer) → Settings → Machine translation] and a project template [Projects → Templates → (select a project template) → Project details → Machine translation]. The configuration at those levels will of course overwrite global settings.

Everything that you can configure at UI level is located in the window found in the global configuration. However, it is important to remember that all of these endpoints can also be configured freely at database level by the XTM Support team.

Retry and timeout mechanisms

There are two important things to remember about Custom MT.

  • There is currently no retry mechanism. If the XTM encounters an issue while sending a request to the Custom MT (500), it would be necessary to reanalyze the project.

  • There is also no timeout within which the Custom MT has to return the translation. With the Custom MT feature, XTM Cloud will continue requesting the status of the translation until it receives a response that is either successful or an error status. In other words, XTM will keep asking as long as the Custom MT keeps responding with the IN_PROGRESS status. Every other status will break the process.