Machine Translation (Questionnaire 3)

Machine Translation is the utilization of computers to the assignment of translating a text from a natural language, to another one. MT is one of the earliest researches in computer science. It has demonstrated to be a fleeting goal. Nowadays there are many systems which produce results with enough quality to be useful in so many specific fields.

At its simple grade, Machine translation makes simple exchanges of words in a natural language for word in another. Otherwise, with corpus techniques, the translation will be more complex.

Definition from the European Association for Machine Translation: “an organization that serves the growing community of people interested in MT and translation tools, including users, developers, and researchers of this increasingly viable technology”.

There are many types of Machine Translation:  Rule-based machine translation, Statistical machine translation and finally, Example-based machine translation.

1. RULE-BASED MACHINE TRANSLATION:

At this kind of machine translation we can find: transfer-based machine translation, interlingual machine translation and finally, dictionary-based machine translation.

1. STATISTICAL:

This one makes translations using statistical methods which are based on bilingual text corpora. For example: Canadian Hansard corpus, the English-French record of the Canadian parliament and EUROPARL, the record of the European Parliament.

1. EXAMPLE-BASED:

This last one, is mainly a translation which is made by analogy. It can be considered as a use of case-based reasoning, which is an approximation to machine learning.

To end up with this article, I also have to mention some online automatic translators:

• OpenTrad
• Systran
• ProMT
• Lucy
• Google Traductor
• Translated
• WorldLingo

 REFERENCES:

• Machine Translation. (2009, March 08). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:54, March 09, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
• Machine Translation. (2008, December 13). In Artificial Intelligence Topics. Retrieved 12:57, May 02, 2009, from http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/MachineTranslation
• Machine Translation. In Machine Translation Engine. Retrieved 12:45, March 28, 2009, from http://www.foreignword.com/Tools/transnow.htm
• Open Trad, traducción automática de código abierto. Retrieved 19:39, March 31, 2009, from http://www.opentrad.org/
• Systran (1997-2004). In Instituto Cervantes, servicio de traducción automática interactivo. Retrieved 19:44, March 31, 2009, from http://oesi.cervantes.es/traduccionAutomatica.html
• ProMT. Retrieved 19:46, March 31, 2009, from http://elmundo.reverso.net/textonly/default.asp
• Lucy, traductor automático. Retrieved 19:49, March 31, 2009, from http://www.translendium.net:8080/home
• Google Traductor (2009). In Google. Retrieved 19:53, March 31, 2009, from http://translate.google.com/
• Translated, the easy way to translate your documents. Retrieved 11:49, April 01, 2009, from http://www.translated.net/en/preventivo.php?refid=3236
• WorldLingo. (2008). Retrieved 11:52, April 01, 2009, from http://www.worldlingo.com/es/products_services/computer_translation.html