METEO® Machine-Translation System

Montreal, May 24, 1997 - Twenty years ago today, the first machine-translated weather forecast in the world was produced in Canada by the METEO system. This event is being celebrated today by John Chandioux Consultants Inc., who lease METEO to the Government of Canada.

John Chandioux, the Director of Applications for the TAUM Group at the University of Montreal for several years, subsequently moved to the private sector and developed the commercial version of the METEO system. METEO has evolved over the years, migrating from the 1977 super computer (Control Data's Cyber 7600) to a UNIX system (Cromemco) in 1983 and, ultimately, to an IBM-PC network (under Novell) in 1991.

METEO provides weather forecasts in French and English for the whole of Canada. Starting at 7,500 words a day in 1977, the system today translates close to 80,000 words a day or more than 30 million words a year. A complete computer-assisted translators' work centre, the current version of METEO incorporates two fully-automatic translation modules and two machine-assisted manual translation modules, as well as communications and administrative support functions. METEO now performs 91% of the workload of Environment Canada's translation team in Ville Saint-Laurent, Quebec.

In 1996, the U.S. National Weather Service selected METEO to ensure that all forecasts, watches, warnings and advisories issued for the Atlanta Olympic Games were available in French. METEO 96 translated more than 305,000 words in 16 days with better than 93% accuracy, a task which would have taken a human translator 7½ months. Output was edited by three bilingual Canadian meteorologists.

With a turn-around time of approximately four minutes per text, METEO and METEO 96 ensure that vital weather information is rapidly available to keep the general public weather-wise and weather-safe.