Machine translation (MT) is the use of a computer software to translate a text from one language to another, and it is considered a field inside the Computational Linguistics. It’s a very used software now that the Internet is so multilingual.
As most of you will already know, we can find many translators on the Internet, but we have to remember that the quality of these translations will never be the same –or at least not for now– as it would be if it was translated by a person. But it’s a very fast way to translate a text or speech and this is probably the reason for its success.
Let’s take as an example the Reverso translator to see what type of translation we would have.
El coche de mi padre es azul.
If I write this sentence in the translator, and choose the option Spanish – English, this is what I get:
The car of my father is blue.
It may not be a perfect translation, as a more common way to say it would be “My father’s car is blue”, but we see that it can be really helpful. It’s a good and fast translation.
But, what process does the translator follow to be able to give us that sentence in another language?
It’s quite simple to understand, but not so easy to carry out: The software decodes the meaning of the text we introduce and once done this, it re-encodes everything again but in the new natural language. So, we could say that the translator “understands” what we write and using this information, re-writes everything again in another language.
In conclusion, machine translation is a technique that has been highly successful in the whole world for its rapidity and efficiency.
These are some translators that can be used online:
References:
- Machine Translation. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:45, May 29, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
- Machine ranslation. In AITopics. Retrieved 00:02, May 30, 2009, from: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/MachineTranslation
