Machine

Translation
Machine translation is
automated translation. It is the
process by which computer
software is used to translate a
text from one natural language
to another.
To process any translation,
human or automated, the
meaning of a text in the original
language must be fully restored
in the target language, i.e. the
translation.
Scientists and academics
have been trying to
automate translation
for almost as long as
computers have been in existence.
In the 1940s and 1950s it was widely assumed that
once the vocabulary and the rules of grammar of a
language had been codified, it would make
automated translation easy, according to some
researchers.
But attempts to make computers learn languages in
this way were largely unsuccessful, unless the range of
words they were expected to translate was very
limited.
Then in the 1980s, computer giant IBM carried out
pioneering research into the use of words in
sentences. Specifically, its researchers examined the
relative frequency of different groups of three words
occurring in a sentence.
Rule-Based MT
+ Consistent and predictable quality - Unpredictable translation quality
+ Out-of-domain translation quality
+ Knows grammatical rules
+ High performance and robustness
+ Consistency between versions
- Lack of fluency
- Hard to handle exceptions to rules
- High development and
customization costs
Statistical MT
- Poor out-of-domain quality
- Does not know grammar
- High CPU and disk space
requirements
- Inconsistency between versions
+ Good fluency
+ Good for catching exceptions to
rules
+ Rapid and cost-effective
development costs provided the
required corpus exists
 “The main problem is that
language is too complex”,
explains Philipp Koehn, a
machine translator
researcher at the University
of Edinburgh School of
Informatics. “Language is
always ambiguous, so you
can’t always use rules, and
new vocabulary is always
coming in, so you need
someone to continually
maintain those rules”.
Disambiguation
Word-sense disambiguation
concerns finding a suitable
translation when a word can
have more than one meaning.
The problem was first raised in the 1950s
by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. He pointed out that
without a "universal encyclopedia", a machine
would never be able to distinguish between the
two meanings of a word.
Google Translate
GT is a free translation service that provides instant
translations between 65 different languages.
GT works in a strange way: it doesn’t translate from
one language to another directly, but often
translates first to English and then to the target
language. But English is also ambiguous and
depends of context, and this is the main source of
translation errors.
BING Translator
The engine Bing Translator is running on was first
developed by Yahoo!, and was known as Yahoo!
Babel Fish – a free web-based multilingual
translation application.
Yahoo! didn’t sell its application to Microsoft, but
simply transitioned its services to Bing Translator. This
is also a statistical translation platform
1. John Hutchins, Machine translations: problems
and issues, panel at conference, 2007
2. Mathias Winther Madsen, The Limits of Machine
Translation, 2009
3. http://www.bbc.co.uk
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
5. http://www.systransoft.com