Machine Translation – How it Works, What Users Expect, and What They Get
Machine translation (MT) systems are now ubiquitous. This ubiquity is due to a combination of increased need for translation in today’s global marketplace, and an exponential growth in computing power that has made such systems viable. And under the right circumstances, MT systems are a powerful tool. They offer low-quality translations in situations where low-quality translation is better than no translation at all, or where a rough translation of a large document delivered in seconds or minutes is more useful than a good translation delivered in three weeks’ time.
Unfortunately, despite the widespread accessibility of MT, it is clear that the purpose and limitations of such systems are frequently misunderstood, and their capability widely overestimated. In this article, I want to give a brief overview of how MT systems work and thus how they can be put to best use. Then, I’ll present some data on how Internet-based MT is being used right now, and show that there is a chasm between the intended and actual use of such systems, and that users still need educating on how to use MT systems effectively.
How machine translation works
You might have expected that a computer translation program would use grammatical rules of the languages in question, combining them with some kind of in-memory “dictionary” to produce the resulting translation. And indeed, that’s essentially how some earlier systems worked. But most modern MT systems actually take a statistical approach that is quite “linguistically blind”. Essentially, the system is trained on a corpus … Read more