Machine Translation

"Martin J. Dürst" duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp
Fri Sep 11 12:13:43 CEST 2009


Hello Michael,

On 2009/09/11 17:24, Michael Everson wrote:
> On 11 Sep 2009, at 07:28, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>
>> I think this is definitely mostly not true. The chances that a good
>> translation is done by a machine are very low. In case you know
>> about good machine translations, maybe you could give us an example?
>
> Simple lookup dictionaries that translate, correctly, single words or
> short phrases are widespread;

Good dictionaries usually contain several entries for each word in the 
source language; what you do in that case is lookup, not translation.

Short phrases could indeed be the place where machine translation has 
its best chance currently: memory is cheap, phrases can eliminate 
ambiguity, and if they are short, they are suited to lookup without much 
processing.

> I have several on my iPhone, and Mac OS
> ships a Systran widget with its OS X Dashboard. This is machine
> translation.

Mostly just lookup, isn't it?

Regards,   Martin.

> It may differ from Babelfish or Systren or Google web-
> page translation, but it is done by a machine nonetheless, and is
> reliable and accurate.
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
>
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-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp


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