THE TRANSLATION OF LANGUAGES BY MACHINE
Victor H. Yngve · 1956
machine. This paper proposes a system 1 for translating languages by machine—with the hope that when such a system is worked out in detail, some of the language barriers can be overcome. It is hoped, too, that the translations will have an accuracy and readability that will make them welcome to readers of scientific and technical literature. Much of the work that has been done up to this time in the field of mechanical translation has been concerned with the possibilities of word-forword translation 2,3 because it can be easily mechanized. A word-for-word translation consists merely of substituting for each word of one language a word or words from the other language. The order of the words is preserved. Of course, the machine would deal only with the written form of the languages, the input being from a keyboard and the output from a printer. Word-for-word translations have been shown to be surprisingly good and they may be quite worth while, but they are far from perfect. Since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the vocabularies of different languages, a word-for-word translation must list alternative translations for most of the words and the choice among them is left to the ultimate reader, who must make his way through a multiple-choice guessing game. The inclusion of multiple choices confuses and slows the reader, even though he can frequently glean the correct meaning after study. Another great problem is that the word order, frequently quite different in the two languages, further obscures the meaning for the reader. Lastly, there are the more subtle difficulties of idioms and the particular quaint and different ways that various languages have of expressing the same simple things. While it has been suggested in the past that rough word-for-word translations could be put into final shape by a human editor, the ideal situation is that the machine should do the whole job. The system proposed here is believed to be capable of producing translations that are considerably better than word-for-word translations.