The Current State of Machine Translation

Harold L. Somers


Abstract
This paper aims to survey the current state of research, development and use of Machine Translation (MT). Under ‘research’ the role of linguistics is discussed, and contrasted with research in ‘analogy- based’ MT. The range of languages covered by MT systems is discussed, and the lack of development for minority languages noted. The new research area of spoken language translation (SLT) is reviewed, with some major differences between SLT and text MT described. Under ‘use and users’ we discuss tools for users: Translation Memory, bilingual concordances and software to help checking for mistranslations. The use of MT on the World Wide Web is also discussed, regarding pre- and post-editing, the impact of ‘controlled language’ is reviewed, and finally a proposal is made that MT users can revise the input text in the light of errors that the system makes, thus ‘post-editing the source text’.
Anthology ID:
1997.mtsummit-plenaries.12
Volume:
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VI: Plenaries
Month:
October 29 – November 1
Year:
1997
Address:
San Diego, California
Editors:
Virginia Teller, Beth Sundheim
Venue:
MTSummit
SIG:
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
115–124
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/1997.mtsummit-plenaries.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Harold L. Somers. 1997. The Current State of Machine Translation. In Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit VI: Plenaries, pages 115–124, San Diego, California.
Cite (Informal):
The Current State of Machine Translation (Somers, MTSummit 1997)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/1997.mtsummit-plenaries.12.pdf