Machine Translation: How Far Can It Go?

This is a very short book (150 pages, including index and references), which introduces the basic concepts of machine translation and offers a concise and clear exposition of the problems and issues faced by MT. It was meant for a Japanese audience (this translation appears three years after the original book did), and in some respects it can be seen as self-advertising for the Japanese industry; at the same time, it is also a good description of the specific problems encountered in translating between Japanese and English, and it gives a refreshing view of the history of the field, which has usually been recounted from the Western side. As each example contains the original Japanese text, its transliteration, and a word-for-word gloss as well as the English translation, a reader with no knowledge of Japanese can follow quite easily the explanations that were meant for a Japanese reader. However, I have a few reservations. The translation is sometimes awkward, especially in the second, more technical, part of the book, and it suffers from not having been checked by a linguist: such expressions as referent and referring are not used consistently, nor in a standard way (e.g., when a subject NP is said to refer to its predicate), and there is one case of actual mistranslation, where Chomsky's theory is referred to as transformational generation grammar. Another unfortunate choice of terminology is that of analytical, transformational, and generative grammars instead of the more widely used and theory-neutral grammars for analysis, transfer, and generation (p. 125). More important is the lack of references, which raises the question of who the intended audience is. The bibliography is very short and not very representative of the field, either in Japan or the rest of the world. Some works mentioned in the main text (e.g., Nida's on the definition of translation; p. 49) are not referenced. Others are casually mentioned without even any name (e.g., tense and time reference problems are supposed to be greatly clarified by "recent linguistic work"; p. 104). Although it is clear that Nagao's original book was not meant for academic research and that the Japanese version was aimed at the open-rainded lay reader, the difficulties resulting from the translation render the English version less easily accessible to the corresponding English public. Nevertheless, in a field where the few books available aim at a specialized audience, Nagao's is a valuable contribution that could prove a good addition to a supplementary reading list in an introductory course in NLP, and could be useful for translators who are not familiar with MT. The two main issues Nagao addresses throughout the book are those of pivot versus transfer and syntax versus semantics. About the first, Nagao claims that the nuances of Japanese linguistic expressions reflecting Japanese culture preclude the use of the same pivot language to translate both within the European languages and between European languages and Japanese. This is too cursorily expressed, but the whole question of the choice between a pivot language and a transfer technique approach is well explained. About the second, unsurprisingly and uncontroversially, Nagao advocates a balanced use of syntax and semantics. More open to controversy is his claim that the word order of the source text should be preserved as a means to maintain focus, and thus pragmatic information. To the question "Which syntax? ", Nagao unequivocally advocates case grammar, which is presented as a means of "resolving questions of syntax on the basis of the meaning relations between nouns and verbs. " To the question "Which semantics? ", Nagao answers that the semantic methods, i.e., "meaning tables" or "semantic networks," which he had proposed for sentence generation in 1963, are now recognized as being unavoidable. His assessment that "at that time, linguistics was not dealing with the problem of meanJlng" would need some qualification, and so would his categorical assertion that Montague semantics, as any truth-value-based semantic theory, has proven inadequate for translation (the ROSETTA project, for instance, cannot be described as a research failure). N agao's conclusion that "language is a massive conglomeration of exceptions" is no surprise, nor is his requirement that tlhe design of any MT system should be flexible, robust, and transparent. However, while it is clear that a good MT system must be open ("allowing not only for the handling of a wide variety of phenomena, but also allowing further additions and modifications of the system"), it is less clear what is meant by a system "capable of self-correcting evolution" (p. 12). Chapter 1, a short history of the field of MT in the world, cow;r.s developments in Japan, as might be expected, but also in the Soviet Union, and it ends with an optimistic asses,lment of the effects of the ALPAC Report, one of