The Present Status of Automatic Translation of Languages

Publisher Summary Machine translation (MT) has become a multimillion dollar affair. Fully automatic, high quality translation is not a reasonable goal, not even for scientific texts. This chapter surveys the situations where translation involved has to be of high quality. A human translator, in order to arrive at his/her high quality output, is obliged to make intelligent use of extra linguistic knowledge that sometimes has to be of considerable breadth and depth. Reasonable goals are either fully automatic, low quality translation or partly automatic, or high quality translation. Full automation of the translation process is incompatible with high quality. The two possible directions where a compromise could be struck are sacrificing quality or reducing the self-sufficiency of the machine output. There are many situations where less than high quality machine output is satisfactory. However, when the aim of MT is lowered to that of high quality translation by a machine-post-editor partnership, the decisive problem becomes to determine the region of optimality in the continuum of possible divisions of labor. The exact position of this region will be a function of the state of linguistic analysis where the languages involved are submitted. With machine-time/efficiency becoming cheaper and human time becoming more expensive, continuous efforts will be made to push this region in the direction of reducing the human element. However, there is no good reason to assume that this region can be pushed to the end of the line, certainly not in the near future.