Pelikhovsky Yu.
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.