Machine Translation -A Rosetta stone for the 21 th century?
Maria M. Hedblom · 2010
Machine Translation(MT) is a sub-genre in Artificial Intelligence that deals with automatic translations between different languages. Historically it has been research for roughly the last century but has been idealised since the 1700th century when Descartes presented the idea of a universal language. There are several different problems facing the translation process, linguistic problems such as differences in grammar, word construction and ambiguous words. But also problems concerning the context in a text, how metaphors and anecdotes are to be translated. To attempt to solve these problems there are different types of MT's. All more or less derived from the more traditional approaches such as Direct MT and Transfer system MT. While Direct MT is a direct translation word for word with a minimum of grammar rules, Transfer system is composed by a large rule book and a simple dictionary. Simplified one can say that Direct MT turned into the Corpus based MT and that Transfer MT today is more referred to as Rule based MT. Knowledge based MT is one of the most common forms of the Rule based MT and example based MT is one of the most common Corpus based MT. Another very common translation system is the Statistical MT where probability rules such as Baye's rule of the Expectation Maximization Algorithm are used. The final version of MT that I have chosen to research is the Hybrid MT. A combination of several or all the MT's above. Machine Translation A Rosetta stone for the 21th century? Maria Hedblom, marhe503 2010-10-03 Kognitionsvetenskap 2