Going beyond Google Translate? Facing Complexity

We motivate and describe the design and implementation of a web-based system for the alignment of parallel texts. It builds on the interactive color-highlight interface now deployed at Google Translate. By a series of simple point and click operations translators can mark up equivalent text-ranges in their own translation and in the original. When successful, the visual cues created by this activity should benefit the understanding of readers of limited degrees of bilingualism -- and may also capture aspects of semantic context not readily available to algorithmic statistical machine translation. We provide a working demonstration that treats poetic texts.