  The Swiss avalanche bulletin is produced twice a day in four languages. Due
to the lack of time available for manual translation, a fully automated
translation system is employed, based on a catalogue of predefined phrases and
predetermined rules of how these phrases can be combined to produce sentences.
The system is able to automatically translate such sentences from German into
the target languages French, Italian and English without subsequent
proofreading or correction. Our catalogue of phrases is limited to a small
sublanguage. The reduction of daily translation costs is expected to offset the
initial development costs within a few years. After being operational for two
winter seasons, we assess here the quality of the produced texts based on an
evaluation where participants rate real danger descriptions from both origins,
the catalogue of phrases versus the manually written and translated texts. With
a mean recognition rate of 55%, users can hardly distinguish between the two
types of texts, and give similar ratings with respect to their language
quality. Overall, the output from the catalogue system can be considered
virtually equivalent to a text written by avalanche forecasters and then
manually translated by professional translators. Furthermore, forecasters
declared that all relevant situations were captured by the system with
sufficient accuracy and within the limited time available.
