English Romanian Translation

Well-formed output in machine translation

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

Is the output grammatical or well-formed in the target language? Using an interlingua should be helpful in this regard, because with a fixed interlingua one should be able to write a grammatical mapping to the target language from the interlingua. Consider the following Arabic language input and English language translation result [...]

Machine translation – Adaptive to colloquialism, argot or slang

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Is the system adaptive to colloquialism, argot or slang? The French language has many rules for creating words in the speech and writing of popular culture. Two such rules are: (a) The reverse spelling of words such as femme to meuf. (This is called verlan.) (b) The attachment of the suffix -ard [...]

BLEU

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

BLEU was one of the first metrics to report high correlation with human judgements of quality. The metric is currently one of the most popular in the field. The central idea behind the metric is that “the closer a machine translation is to a professional human translation, the better it is”.[1] The [...]

Automatic evaluation

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

In the context of this article, a metric will be understood as a measurement. A metric for the evaluation of machine translation output is a measurement of the quality of the output. The quality of a translation is inherently subjective, there is no objective or quantifiable “good”. Therefore, the task for [...]

Machine translation applications

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

There are now many software programs for translating natural language, several of them online, such as:

SYSTRAN, which powers Yahoo’s Babel Fish
Promt, which powers online translation services at Voila.fr and Orange.fr

Although no system provides the holy grail of fully automatic high-quality machine translation, many systems produce reasonable output.
Despite their inherent limitations, MT programs [...]

Disambiguation in machine translation

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

Word-sense disambiguation concerns finding a suitable translation when a word can have more than one meaning. The problem was first raised in the 1950s by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.[1] He pointed out that without a “universal encyclopedia”, a machine would never be able to distinguish between the two meanings of a word.[2] Today there [...]

Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC)

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

One of the constituent parts of the ALPAC report was a study comparing different levels of human translation with machine translation output, using human subjects as judges. The human judges were specially trained for the purpose. The evaluation study compared an MT system translating from Russian into English with human translators, [...]

Approaches in machine translation

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Pyramid showing comparative depths of intermediary representation, interlingual machine translation at the peak, followed by transfer-based, then direct translation.
Machine translation can use a method based on linguistic rules, which means that words will be translated in a linguistic way — the most suitable (orally speaking) words of the target language [...]

Computer-assisted translation

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation, or CAT is a form of translation wherein a human translator translates texts using computer software designed to support and facilitate the translation process.
Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided, translation.
Computer-assisted translation and machine translation
Some advanced computer-assisted translation solutions include controlled machine translation (MT). Integration [...]

Round-trip translation

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Although this may intuitively be a good method of evaluation, it has been shown that round-trip translation is a, “poor predictor of quality”. The reason why it is such a poor predictor of quality is reasonably intuitive. When a round-trip translation is performed, the method is not testing one system, but [...]

Translation process with machine translation

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

The translation process may be stated as:

Decoding the meaning of the source text; and
Re-encoding this meaning in the target language.

Behind this ostensibly simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation. To decode the meaning of the source text in its entirety, the translator must interpret and analyse all the features of the text, a [...]

Evaluation of machine translation

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

Various methods for the evaluation for machine translation have been employed. This article will focus on the evaluation of the output of machine translation, rather than on performance or usability evaluation.
Before covering the large scale studies, a brief comment will be made on one of the more pervasive evaluation techniques, that of [...]

History of the machine translation

Monday, January 19th, 2009

The idea of machine translation may be traced back to 17th century. In 1629, René Descartes proposed a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol. In the 1950s, The Georgetown experiment (1954) involved fully-automatic translation of over sixty Russian sentences into English. The experiment was a great [...]

Machine translation

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. At its basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another. [...]