  Colloquial English (CE) as found in television programs or typical
conversations is different than text found in technical manuals, newspapers and
books. Phrases tend to be shorter and less sophisticated. In this paper, we
look at some of the theoretical and implementational issues involved in
translating CE. We present a fully automatic large-scale multilingual natural
language processing system for translation of CE input text, as found in the
commercially transmitted closed-caption television signal, into simple target
sentences. Our approach is based on the Whitelock's Shake and Bake machine
translation paradigm, which relies heavily on lexical resources. The system
currently translates from English to Spanish with the translation modules for
Brazilian Portuguese under development.
