Machine Translation
How Far Can it Go?
Published in December 1988
Book
Hardback
168 pages
978-0-19-853739-7 (ISBN)
Description
This work is concerned with machine translation - that is, translation from one natural language to another by means of computer. Translation systems employing computers are now readily available from several makers such as NEC and Fujitsu and they are fully made use of in the translation of technical literature in Japan. Machine translation is also in practical use for translation of meteorological information in Canada and in the translation of conference proceedings in the European Community. This work, described from the Japanese point of view, looks at how far the quality and range of machine translation can be improved and extended for the future, as well as giving an account of the process of machine translation. Developments in MT systems are given along with suggestions for the utilization of these systems. Samples in the book are taken from achievements in Japan's MT project.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
27 figures, references, index
Dimensions
Height: 220 mm
Weight
359 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-853739-7 (9780198537397)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Content
Part 1 Progress in research on machine translation systems in Japan: the place of techniques for natural language processing in future information industries; machine translation systems - the choice between pivot-language and transfer techniques; future developments in machine translation systems. Part 2 The dawn of machine translation: the Sputnick shock; the start of machine translation in Japan; difficulties in analyzing sentences; "The ALPAC Report"; a period of reflection. Part 3 Revival of machine translation: a system for translating article titles; the current situation in Japan; developments in other countries. Part 4 Perspective on machine translation: what is translation?; varieties of translation texts; facts - speaker - environment; automatic translation of sentences. Part 5 The process of machine translation: the principle of compositionality; sentence analysis and translation; problems in syntactic analysis; semantic analysis of syntactic ambiguities; the role of semantics in the analysis of sentence structure. Part 6 Methods of analysis of sentence structure: phrase structure grammar; case grammar; procedures in sentence analysis; embedded sentences. Part 7 The selection of words for translation and sentence generation: intermediary expressions; the selection of words for translation; structural transfers; sentence generation; Japanese and English - some differences in sentence structure. Part 8 Machine translation systems: actual procedures; software systems; dictionaries; pre-editing and post-editing. Part 9 The future of machine translation systems: towards higher-level translation capabilities; the understanding of language; the future of practical systems; the need for long-term basic research.