Machine Translation: Past, Present and Future

However, the Internet is having further profound impacts that will surely change the future prospects for machine translation. There are predictions that the stand-alone PC with its array of software for word-processing, databases and games will be replaced by Network Computers which would download systems and programs from the Internet at any time as required. In this scenario, the one-off purchase of individually packaged machine translation software or dictionaries would be replaced by remote stores of machine translation programs, dictionaries, grammars, translation archives or specialized glossaries which would obviously be paid for according to usage. It is should be to said, that such a change would have profound effect on the way in which machine translation systems are developed.

Another profound impact of the Internet will concern the nature of the software itself. What users of Internet services are seeking is information in whatever language it may have been written or stored. Users will want a seamless integration of information retrieval, extraction and summarization systems with translationIn fact, it is possible that in next years there will be fewer "pure" machine translation systems (commercial or on-line) and many more computer-based tools and applications in which automatic translation is just one component. As a first step, it will surely not be long before all word-processing software includes translation as an in-built option. Integrated language software will be the norm not only for the multinational companies but also available and accessible for anyone from their own computer (desktop, laptop, notebook or network-based server) and for any device like television or mobile telephone which interfacing with computer networks.

Spoken Language Translation

The most widely anticipated development of the next decade must be that of speech translation. When current research projects (ATR, C-STAR, JANUS, Verbmobil) were begun in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was known that practical applications were unlikely before the next century. The limitation of these systems to small domains has clearly been essential for any progress, such are the complexities of the task; but these limitations mean that, when practical demonstrations are made, observers will want to know when broader coverage will be realizable. There is a danger here that the mistakes of the 1950s and 1960s might be repeated; then, it was assumed that once basic principles and methods had been successfully demonstrated on small-scale research systems it would be merely a question of finance and engineering to create large practical systems. The truth was otherwise; large-scale machine translation systems have to be designed as such from the beginning, and that requires many man-years of effort. It is still true to say that the best written-language machine translation systems of today are the outcome of decades of research and development.

Whatever the high expectations, it is surely unlikely that we will see practical speech translation of significantly large domains for commercial exploitation for another twenty years or more. Far more likely, and in line with general trends within the field of written language machine translation, is that there will be numerous applications of spoken language translation as components of small-domain natural language applications, e.g. interrogation of databases (particularly financial and stockmarket data), interactions in business negotiations or intra-company communication.

Machine and Human Translation

In the past there has often been tension between the translation profession and those who advocate and research computer-based translation tools. But now at the beginning of the 21-st century it is already apparent that machine translation and human translation can and will co-exist in relative harmony. Those skills which the human translator can contribute will always be in demand.

Where translation has to be of "publishable" quality, both human translation and machine translation perform their roles. Machine translation is demonstrably cost-effective for large scale and/or rapid translation of (boring) technical documentation, (highly repetitive) software localization manuals, and many other situations where the costs of machine translation plus essential human preparation and revision or the costs of using computerized translation tools are significantly less than those of traditional human translation with no computer aids. By contrast, the human translator is (and will remain) unrivalled for non-repetitive linguistically sophisticated texts (in literature or law), and even for one-off texts in specific highly-specialized technical subjects.

For the translation of texts where the quality of output is much less important, machine translation is often an ideal solution. For example, to produce "rough" translations of scientific and technical documents that may be read by only one person who wants to find out only the general content and information and is unconcerned whether everything is intelligible or not, and who is certainly not discouraged by stylistic awkwardness or grammatical errors, machine translation will increasingly be the only appropriate decision. In general, human translators are not prepared (and may resent being asked) to produce such "rough" translations. In such a case the only alternative to machine translation is no translation at all.

However, as I have already mentioned, greater familiarity with "crummy" translations will inevitably stimulate demand for the kind of good quality translations which only human translators can satisfy.For the one-to-one interchange of information, there will probably always be a role for the human translator, that is for the translation of business correspondence (particularly if the content is sensitive or legally binding). But for the translation of personal letters, machine translation systems are likely to be increasingly used; and, for e-mail and for the extraction of information from Web pages and computer-based information services, machine translation is the only feasible solution.

As for spoken translation, there must surely always be a place for the human translator. There can be no prospect of automatic translation replacing the interpreter of diplomatic negotiations.

Finally, machine translation systems are opening up new areas where human translation has never featured: the production of draft versions for authors writing in a foreign language, who need assistance in producing an original text; the real-time on-line translation of television subtitles; the translation of information from databases; and, no doubt, more such new applications will appear in the future as the global communication networks expand and as the realistic usability of machine translation (however poor in quality compared with human translation) becomes familiar to a wider public.

Concluding remarks

Different electronic devices have become common nowadays. Taking information from foreign languages with the help of different electronic devices represents quite a new approach in modern translation practice. Due to the fundamental research in the systems of algorithms and in the establishment of lexical equivalence in different strata of lexicon, machine translation has made considerable progress in recent years. Nevertheless, its usage remains restricted in scientific, technological, lexicographic realms. That is because machine translation can be performed only on the basis of programmes worked out by linguistically trained operators. Besides, the process of preparing programmes for any matter is inseparably connected with great difficulties and takes much time, whereas the quality of translation is far from being satisfactory even at the lexical level, which have direct equivalent lexemes in the target language. Considerably greater difficulties, which are insurmountable for machine translation programs, present morphological elements like prefixes, suffixes, endings, etc. Syntactic units (word combinations, sentences) with various means of connection between their components are also great obstacles for machine translation. Moreover, modern electronic devices which perform translation do not possess the necessary lexical, grammatical and stylistic memory to provide the required standard of correct literary translation. Hence, the frequent violations of syntactic agreement and government between the parts of the sentence in machine translated texts. Very often the machine translation program can not select in its memory the correct order of words in word-combinations and sentences in the target language. And as a result of it, any machine translation requires a thorough proof reading and editing and this takes no less time and efforts and may be as tiresome as the usual hand-made translation of the passage.