METEO System

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The METEO® System is a machine translation system specifically designed for the translation of the weather forecasts issued daily by Environment Canada. The system was used from 1981 to the 30th of September 2001 by Environment Canada to translate forecasts issued in French in the province of Quebec into English and those issued in English in other Canadian provinces into French^[1]. Since then, a competitor program has replaced METEO® System after an open governemental bid.

The system was developed by John Chandioux and was often mentioned as one of the few success stories in the field of machine translation. However, the lost of its main contract shows that METEO® System is not alone anymore.

[edit] History

METEO® System stems from a prototype developed in 1975-76 by the TAUM Group, known as TAUM-METEO, and many authors confuse the prototype with the actual system. The first version of the system (METEO 1) went into operation on a Control Data 7600 supercomputer in March 1977. John Chandioux then created his own metalanguage for linguistic applications, named GramR®, developed it for microcomputers following Alain Colmerauer's advice.

Since all official communications emanating from the Canadian government must be available in French and English, because of the official bilingual services act of 1968, and weather bulletins represent a large amount of translation in real time, Environment Canada was looking for an automated program. METEO 1 has demonstrated the feasibility of microcomputer-based machine translation to the satisfaction of the Canadian government's Translation Bureau and was adopted in 1981.

In 1982, John Chandioux started developing a new system written in GramR (METEO 2), on a high-end Cromemco microcomputer, which went into operation in 1983. The software then ran in 48kb of central memory with a 5Mb hard disk for paging. METEO is believed to have been the first MT application to run on a microcomputer.

In 1996, John Chandioux developed a special version of his system (METEO 96) which was used to translate the weather forecasts issued by the US Weather Service during the Atlanta Olympic Games.

The latest known version of the system, METEO 5, dates from 1997 and runs on a standard IBM PC network under Windows NT. It translates 10 pages per second, while occupying so little space that it fits on a 1.44Mb diskette. Serious uptading have to be done in order for METEO® System to regain contract with the Canadian government.