On the third questionnaire, one of the subjects we have seen is machine translation. We have been asked to write a short Curriculum Vitae in Spanish and then translate it with three different online-translators (Google Translator, Lucy Translator and Reverso Translator). The results were more or less satisfying, but there were some big mistakes on the Spanish-English translation. Here is an example:
Entre mis aficiones, además de los idiomas, se encuentra la música. Estudié solfeo durante 8 años en el Conservatorio Municipal de Música Bartolomé Ercilla de Durango […]
Among my interests, besides the languages, he|she finds the music. I studied sol-fa|solfeggio for 8 years in the Municipal Conservatoire|Conservatory of Music Bartolomé Ercilla de Durango […]
What’s more, in one online translator we are warned and told that an automatic translation will never have the same quality of a translation done by a person (and the translation will be worse if the language is colloquial). Nevertheless, it is useful and you don’t spend so much time.
Machine Translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics and it is the application of computers to translate a text from one natural language to another. What basic MT does is to substitute words from one natural language to another, but more complex translations use corpus techniques and pay attention to the linguistic typology and translate idioms, among other things.
Users can interact with some translators and make the translations less ambiguous, for some of those systems give the user the opportunity to say which words are names. What others translators offer is a list of suggestions, the user chooses the one which best fits with what he was searching for and if none of the possibilities is what he looks for, he does some changes until he gets what he wants. After the TransType project, the results showed that with this way of translating users didn’t spend so much time an effort.
To sum up, we should add something that Ana Fernández Guerra and Francisco Fernández wrote in the book “Machine Translation, Capabilities and Limitations“. We could make some statements in the activity of translating:
- The possibility of translation: we are supposed to reproduce with total exactness every single piece of text or linguistic structure in other language we would find it difficult.
- Realize that we don’t translate from one language as a system to another language as a system, but from one text into another text.
- We should be cautious about some dogmatic statements.
- In the content (or message) of the text we must consider: meaning, designation and sense.
- Machine translation. (2009, May 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:54, May 22, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=290714195
- Machine Translation. (2009). In foreignworld.com. Retrieved 19:23, May 22, 2009, from http://www.foreignword.com/Tools/transnow.htm
- Machine Translation. (2008, December 18). In AIT topics. Retrieved 19:36, May 22, from http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/MachineTranslation
- Machine Translation, Capabilities and Limitations. (Ana Fernández Guerra, Francisco Fernández). (2000). In Universitat de València. Retrieved 11:46, May 23, 2009, from http://books.google.es/books?id=7TE3avRZiSoC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en
