SUBMITTED TO SUBMITTED BYDR. A.S JALAL ANKIT KUMAR BTECH CS 3RD

ROLL NO . 21

Seminar Topic - Machine Translation

What is Machine Translation ??

History of MT The idea of machine translation may be traced back to the 17th

century. In 1629, Rene Descarte proposed a universal language, with

equivalent ideas in different tongues sharing one symbol. The field of “machine translation” appeared in Warren Weaver’s

Memorandum on Translation (1949).  The French Textile Institute also used MT to translate abstracts from

and into French, English, German and Spanish (1970); Brigham Young University started a project to translate Mormon texts by automated translation (1971).

 More innovations during this time included MOSES, the open-source statistical MT engine (2007), a text/SMS translation service for mobiles in Japan (2008), and a mobile phone with built-in speech-to-speech translation functionality for English, Japanese and Chinese (2009). Recently, Google announced that Google Translate translates roughly enough text to fill 1 million books in one day (2012).

MT Approaches

There are two approaches of Machine Translation.

Statical MT Technology

Rule Based MT Technology

Statical MT Technology Unpredictable translation quality Poor out-of-domain quality Does not know grammar High CPU and disk space requirements Inconsistency between versions Good fluency Good for catching exceptions to rules Rapid and cost-effective development

costs provided the required corpus exists

Rule based MT technology Consistent and predictable quality Out-of-domain translation quality Knows grammatical rules High performance and robustness Consistency between versions Lack of fluency Hard to handle exceptions to rules High development and customization

costs

How to work ??

Block Diagram

Machine vs Human Translation

Example

Conceptual difference

• ‘wall’ German Wand ~ Mauer• ‘corner’ Spanish esquina ~ rincón• ‘leg’ French jambe ~ patte ~ pied• ‘leg’ Spanish pierna ~ pata ~ pie• ‘blue’ Russian голубой ~ синый• Fr. louer hire ~ rent• Sp. paloma pigeon ~ dove

Applications While no system provides the holy grail of fully automatic

high-quality machine translation of unrestricted text, many fully automated systems produce reasonable output.

The International Society of Automation contributed 3.072 million euros for the creation of MT.

With the recent focus on terrorism, the military sources in the United States have been investing significant amounts of money in natural language engineering.

Currently the military community is interested in translation and processing of languages like Arabic, Pashto and Dari.

The notable rise of social networking on the web in recent years has created yet another niche for the application of machine translation software – in utilities such as Facebook, or instant messaging clients such as Skype, GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger, etc. – allowing users speaking different languages to communicate with each other.

Advantage of MT When time is a crucial factor, machine translation can save the

day. You don't have to spend hours poring over dictionaries to translate the words. Instead, the software can translate the content quickly and provide a quality output to the user in no time at all.

The next benefit of machine translation is that it is comparatively cheap. Initially, it might look like a unnecessary investment but in the long run it is a very small cost considering the return it provides. This is because if you use the expertise of a professional translator, he will charge you on a per page basis which is going to be extremely costly while this will be cheap.

Confidentiality is another matter which makes machine translation  favorable. Giving sensitive data to a translator might be risky while with machine translation your information is protected.

A machine translator usually translates text which is in any language so there is no such major concern while a professional translator specializes in one particular field.

Disadvantage of MT

Accuracy is not offered by the machine translation on a consistent basis. You can get the gist of the draft or documents but machine translation only does word to word translation without comprehending the information which might have to be corrected manually later on.

Systematic and formal rules are followed by machine translation so it cannot concentrate on a context and solve ambiguity and neither makes use of experience or mental outlook like a human translator can.