Machine Translation Systems
C. K. Quah · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2006
Machine translation is an important technology socio-politically, commercially and scientifically, despite many misconceptions about its success or lack of it over the decades. The emergence of the Internet as one of the main media of modern communication has turned translation into a bridge that connects speakers of different languages. The endless traffic of communication between different language groups requires translation, but when instant translations are needed, human translators are not able to supply them fast enough. A highly skilled profession like translation using human translators is expensive and also slow, especially when a large number of languages and subject fields are involved. In order to meet the growing translation demand, machine translation systems are seen as a cost-effective alternative to human translators in a variety of situations. Ever since the first system was built, machine translation has been presenting scientific challenges (see also Nirenburg 1996). It became the testing ground for many experiments and applications for natural-language processing, artificial intelligence and even linguistics (Arnold etal. 1994: 4–5). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.