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Machine Translation
Thu, Dec 17th 2009, 14:01 Under Category Useful Information for the Public by sebastian

Due to the efficiency required to get the documents transfer from one to another language, we can see that there are quite number of web links which provide free translation online services or so-called ‘machine translation’.  According to the majority transfer view of machine translation, a certain amount of analysis of the source text is done in the context of the source language alone and a certain amount of work on the translated text is done in the context of the target language, but the bulk of the work relies on comparative information about the specific pair languages. This is argued for on the basis of the sheer difficulty of designing a single interlingua that can be all things for all languages and on the view that translation is, by its very nature, an exercise in comparative linguistics.

A transfer system in which the analysis and generation components are large relative to the transfer component, and where transfer is therefore conducted in terms of quite abstract entities takes on much of the flavour of an interlingual system, while not making the commitment to linguistic universality that many see as the hallmark of the interlingual approach. Such semantic transfer systems are attracting quite a lot of attention.

As we move towards semantics, linguistic divergence fades out. Although languages usually exhibit broad disparity at the morphological and syntactical levels, such linguistic disparity is greatly diminished at the semantic level, at which various syntactical forms are converted to their corresponding logical forms. Formal logic, is basically universal and thus can transcend linguistic boundaries. At this logical level, the sameness of meaning is explicitly expressed, this in turn, enables cross-linguistic mapping and transformation. Engineering-oriented approaches to develop a universal semantic processor which can work multi-lingually have been developed. They adopt a compositional paradigm which decomposes meaning using a universal set of semantic primitives.

Few informed people still see the original ideal of fully automatic high-quality translation of arbitrary texts as a realistic goal for the foreseeable future. Many systems require texts to be pre-edited to put them in a form suitable for treatment by the system, and post-editing of the machine's output is generally taken for granted.

With the above overview of multi-linguality, we can sort of conclude our contrastive analysis in the context of machine translation. This transition could be better visualized if we note that the changing attitude towards translation studies has always been determined by transformations in the theory of language. However, human translation is still strongly recommended in comparison to machine translation at this stage as human translation makes the communication more smoothly and get into the spirit of the documentations.

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