Machine translation, also known as MT, is nowadays one of the most successful devices in the world wide web. As its name claims, it has to do with translating either texts or single sentences. We can say that machine translation is a subfield of computational linguistics which looks into computer software, in order to translate texts or sentences from one natural language to another. Even if at the beginning there were not that much tranlation machines, nowadays there are significantly much more, which are considerably better that they used to be.
Old translation tools are now being replaced by mordern ones which are surely boosting their performance, however, they must be used with caution as they will not be so useful for every aspect of our daily lives.
As I already have claimed, machine translators translate texts from one natural language to another with little difficulties. Nevertheless, there are some sentences or texts which require a different process of translation. Most of them need to be translated by using corpus techniques that allow better dealing with of differences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition, and translation of idioms, as well as the isolation of anomalies. When translating, the computer may have some other difficulties such as the double meaning of some words, for this word sense disambiguation worries to fins a suitable word for the text. One which does not mean something else. The way that the computer distinguishes the different meanings of the words is by a ”universal encyclopedia”, due to this encyclopedia the machine is able to devide meaning approaches this way:
* shallow approaches: This doesn’t need the knowledge required to understand the text, this would be what we call simple translation.
*Deep approaches: They need to use the “universal encyclopedia” these kind of translation needs to translate difficult words, especific word for some specific topics.
References:
*Machine translation. (2009, May 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:19, May 27, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=292599882
* Machine translation. (2009,May 27). In AITopics. Retrieved May 27, 2009, from http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/MachineTranslation
