Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the acronym MT, is part of computational linguistics. It is the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. 

At its basic level, MT changes words words in one natural language for words in another. That is literal translation.

Present machine translation software adapts the translation to the subject. For example, weather reports improve output by limiting the substitutions. This technique is very effective in domains where specialised formal language is used. It follows then that machine translation of government and legal documents more often produces usable output than conversation or less standardised text.

 Quotes 
In the words of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT):

 History 
The origins of machine translation can be traced back to the work of Al-Kindi, a ninth-century Arabic cryptographer. He developed techniques for systemic language translation. He was aware of cryptanalysis, frequency analysis, probability and statistics, which are all used in modern machine translation. 

An idea related to machine translation appeared in the 17th century. In 1629, René Descartes proposed a universal language, where equivalent ideas shared a symbol.

The idea of using digital computers for translation of natural languages was proposed in 1947 by England's A.D. Booth and Warren Weaver at Rockefeller Foundation in the same year. "The memorandum written by Warren Weaver in 1949 is perhaps the single most influential publication in the earliest days of machine translation". 

Others followed. One example was reading and composing Braille texts by computer.

 Related pages
 Translation
 Literal translation

 References 

 References 


 Other websites 
 International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT)
 Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA)
 European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT)
 Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation (APAMT)
 Association for Computational Linguistics
 Machine Translation, an introductory guide to MT by D.J.Arnold et al. (1994)
 Machine Translation Archive  by John Hutchins. An electronic repository (and bibliography) of articles, books and papers in the field of machine translation and computer-based translation technology
 Machine translation (computer-based translation)  — Publications by John Hutchins (includes PDFs of several books on machine translation)
 NIST 2006 Machine Translation Evaluation Official Results 
 NIST 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation Official Results 
 Machine Translation and Minority Languages 
 John Hutchins 1999 
 SMT  An article on statistical machine translation in general and Language Weaver in particular
  Free online machine translation powered by PROMT Supports 24 language directions and the following languages: English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
  How the Computer Translates  An article on machine translation from the founder of PROMT . broken link

Category:Software
Category:Linguistics
Category:Translation