Pelikhovsky Yu.

Chernivtsy National University

Problem of machine translation

 

One of the latest developments in modern translation practice is rendering of information from a foreign language with the help of electronic devices. Nowadays as the world moves toward a global economy, machine translation is the growing wave of the future; with these machines translating passages into another language almost instantaneously. To this day, machine translation continues its progress. Large companies are beginning to use it and software sales to the general public are increasing as well. This situation has led to the creation of on-line machine translation services which offer quick (but rarely efficient) translations in the desired language, as well as multilingual dictionaries, encyclopaedias and free terminology databases.

Machine Translation (MT) is often wrongly mixed with Computer Aided Translation (CAT). These two technologies are the offspring of different approaches, they do not produce the same results, and are used in distinct contexts.

MT aims at assembling all the information necessary for translation in a software programme so that a text can be translated without human intervention whatsoever. It exploits the computer's capacity to analyse the structure of a statement or sentence in the source language, break it down into easily translatable elements and then create a statement with the same structure in the target language.

CAT uses a number of tools to help the translator work accurately and quickly, the most important of which are terminology databases and translation memories. In effect, the computer offers a new way of approaching text processing of both the source and target text.

The technology basically acts as a recycler, offering the professional possible translations for the text he's working on, which are based on previous material. CAT is not capable of producing an immediately useable text, as languages are highly dependent on context. Backed by a translation memory, Computer Aided Translation is considered mainly a save-time tool, rather than a replacement for human activity. It requires post-editing in order to yield a quality target text.

In its simplest form, a translation memory is a database in which a translator stores translations for future re-use, either in the same text or other texts. Basically the software records bilingual pairs: a source-language segment (usually a sentence) combined with a target-language segment.

If an identical or similar source-language segment comes up later, the translation memory will find the previously-translated segment and automatically suggest it for the new translation. The translator is free to accept it without change, edit it to fit the current context, or reject it altogether.

Pure-machine translation can deliver acceptable results when dealing with very predictable technical texts, which never go beyond the expected domain of discourse. But this is little help in the domains where people want translation the most: in spontaneous conversations, in person, on the telephone and on the internet.

Computers just do not have the ability to deal adequately with the various complexities of language that humans handle naturally: ambiguity, syntactic irregularity, multiple word meanings and the influence of context.

A classic example is illustrated in the following pair of sentences: "He drives too fast" and "Patients must come for the blood test on fast".  A computer can be programmed to 'understand' either of these examples, but not to distinguish between the two occurrences of "fast".  A pure-computer translation is similar to the one performed by a human without a deep knowledge of the target language.

Grammatical rules can be memorised, or programmed. But without real knowledge of a language, a human or a computer simply looks up words in a dictionary and has no way to choose between diverse meanings. Computers not only lack the knowledge of the world to deal with word choice, but they also lack the knowledge necessary for cultural sensitivity.

Bibliography:

1.     Корунець І. В. Теорія і практика перекладу (аспектний переклад): Підручник. -Вінниця. «Нова Книга», 2001 -448 с.

2.     В. С. Виноградов Введение в переводоведение (общие и лексические вопросы). — М.: Издательство института общего среднего образования РАО, 2001, — 224 с.