Machine Translation: an Introductory Guide

The topic of the book is the art or science of Automatic Translation, or Machine Translation (MT) as it is generally known – the attempt to automate all, or part of the process of translating from one human language to another. The aim of the book is to introduce this topic to the general reader – anyone interested in human language, translation, or computers.

Book Description

The idea is to give the reader a clear basic understanding of the state of the art, both in terms of what is currently possible, and how it is achieved, and of what developments are on the horizon. This should be especially interesting to anyone who is associated with what are sometimes called “the language industries”; particularly translators, those training to be translators, and those who commission or use translations extensively. But the topics the book deals with are of general and lasting interest, as we hope the book will demonstrate, and no specialist knowledge is presupposed – no background in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Linguistics, or Translation Studies.

This book makes the following points: 1) in analogy with robots, we humans know by the models we make of reality, 2) these models are always provisional and sometimes unreliable, 3) it is especially important to examine thoroughly those models upon which we base actions, and 4) the scientific method provides an excellent guide for such examination.

Table of Contents

• Machine Translation in Practice
• Representation and Processing
• Machine Translation Engines
• Dictionaries
• Translation Problems
• Representation and Processing Revisited: Meaning
• Input
• Evaluating MT Systems
• New Directions in MT

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