Machine Translation Process
Machine translation is the process of translating documents without
further human intervention. Also referred to as MT, the translation is a
procedure where a computer program studies a source text and produces a
target text. Using computers to do translation in different language is
highly recommended in today's fast pace world in certain applications
though it also has its own limitations. In some cases machine
translation is preferred while in other cases human translation is more
preferable. However, we cannot say that machine translation is
completely out of human intervention. Human intervention is involved in
the form of pre-editing and post-editing.
History of Machine Translation
The history of machine translation started way back in the 1950s. The
first work of translation was published in 1954 in the Georgetown
experiment involving fully automatic translation of more than60 Russian
sentences into English. The experiment was a great success and the
authors claimed that machine translation would be used in translations
within three or five years. However, the real progress was very slow.
The ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) report in
1966 further reduced the investment in Machine translation because the
report evaluated the progress in computational linguistics in general
and machine translation in particular and was very skeptical to research
done in machine translation so far and gave more emphasis to the need
for basic research in computational linguistics. However, starting in
the late 1970s and beginning 1980s, with the impact of personal computer
revolution, with the increase in computational power, more interest
began to be shown in statistical models for machine translation. There
was growth in the use of machine translation as a result of the
beginning of less expensive and more powerful computers. With the 1990s,
the importance of machine translation further increased (for better or
worse) and the use of "translation engines" on the Internet to
allow for translation of websites and email languages. Today there are
many software programs several of them online for translating source
language. Such software includes the SYSTRAN system which powers both
Google translate, AltaVista's Babelfish, StarDict etc. These tools
produce a rough translation that gives the summary of the source text.
Recent Research
The area of machine translation has in recent tears has seen major
changes. Presently a large amount of research is done into example-based
machine translation and statistical machine translation. Today, few
companies make use of statistical machine translation commercially. For
example:
- Language Weaver: Sells translation services and products.
- Google: Make use of statistical machine tool system for
some language combination in Google's language tools and
- Microsoft: Make use of MT system to translate knowledge
based articles.
Advantages of Machine Translations
Some of the advantages of machine translations are as follows:
- Machine translations work at a faster rate than human
translations.
- The second advantage of machine translation is that it gives drop
dead consistency. This implies that there is nothing to worry about
someone taking too much creative license with your translation or a
translator forgetting how a particular word was translated in the
previous pages. MT will translate that particular word in the same
way. However the drawback is MT will show the same error over and
over again unless and until it is asked not to.
- Another advantage of machine translation is that it is
comparatively cheaper. It is one time cost -the cost of the tool and
its installation.
Strategies Involved in Machine Translation
- The direct strategy: The first to be used in machine
translation systems is the direct strategy, which involves a minimum
of linguistic theory. It is based on a predefined source
language-target language binomial in which each word of the source
language is linked to a corresponding unit in the target language.
However here there is a unidirectional correlation, for example from
English to Spanish but not the other way round. The following is an
example that shows the direct translation strategy:
- The transfer strategy: The transfer strategy gives
importance on the concept of "level of representation".
This strategy involves three stages. The analysis stage, which is
the direct strategy, describes the source document linguistically,
using a source language dictionary. The transfer stage changes the
results of the analysis stage and produces the linguistic and
structural equivalents between the two languages. A bilingual
dictionary is used to translate the source language to target
language. The third stage is the generation stage which produces the
target language document based on linguistic data of the source
language by using a target language dictionary.
- The pivot language strategy: This strategy is based on
the idea of creating a representation of the document or text
independent of any particular language. This representation
functions as a neutral, universal translated text that is different
from both the source language and the target language.
Where does machine translation work well ?
The success of machine translation is seen in two kinds of documents.
- The texts which have very concrete subjects and follows a regular
procedure. There is no requirement of understanding the content to
translate the text. The technical handbooks belong to this group.
- The other documents are those where the readers need a rough
translation. The texts that are rarely published and mainly
communicative in multinational and national companies belong to the
second group.
Besides the above, the machine translation works well on the
Internet. Basically, the machine translation is appropriate for the
following:
Generally it can be stated, that machine methods can be appropriate:
- For technical/informative texts.
- For texts consisting of many repetitions.
- For texts where it is necessary to keep consistency.
- For texts with small vocabulary.
- For texts which need to be completed quickly.
