It is said that we belong to the Information Age, a time characterized by the digital revolution and the improvements thus achieved in communicating with others.
In a society where we mean to make knowledge available to everyone, quick and effective translation is speedily becoming a necessity. For this, developers of machine translators investigate the possibilities of automatic translation done by computers.
So far, MT can substitute words and rearrange elements to fit the logical order of each target language. However, since the structure of a language is so complicated and full of irregularities, no artificial intelligence can hold all the linguistic rules.
More problems arise when dealing with idioms, polysemes, anaphoras and other ambiguous expressions, which require not only access to a complete internal dictionary, but an actual understanding of the meaning of the original sentences, the purpose of the whole text itself, and even knowledge about the culture of the speakers of each language.
Because of the inconveniences mentioned, it is widely believed that machines will never be able to produce entirely accurate translations. They will always demand human reviewing and some transforming.
That said, MT websites are nevertheless greatly popular and used all over the world, as they have proved themselves a fast and not-so-bad method to get the general idea behind a foreign discourse.
References:
- Machine translation (February 15, 2009). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 02, 2009.
- Information age (February 23, 2009). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 02, 2009.
- MACHINE TRANSLATION: An Introductory Guide (December 21, 1995). By Doug Arnold, Lorna Balkan, Siety Meijer, R.Lee Humphreys and Louisa Sadler, from the University of Essex. Retrieved March 02, 2009.
