Machine
Translation
La plume de ma tante est sur la table?
Do you remember that sentence? Translation from the French: "My aunt's pen is on the table." Learning French begins with some such sentence. So does learning other languages. Traditionally, we have learned other languages word by vocabulary word, one meaning at a time.
We have learned languages word by word, then the grammar "rights and wrongs," then the idioms.
Machine translation, of necessity, has had to follow the same path: essentially word-by-word translation. So, of course, lots of very humorous mistranslations occur. Not so funny, though, where good translation has to occur or has crucial outcomes in diplomacy, business, or trade.
When learning, commerce, business decisions, contract terms, efficiency---to name a few---depend upon accuracy, the humor loses its punch.
theExact Word's® approach by-passes vocabulary definition, not negating word meaning, but approaching meaning through context.
When "the system failed" becomes "until the system failed" or "unless the system failed" the data flow becomes very different types of information. Because each language structures context differently, translation by-passes a focus upon only words. If translation among languages required only word-by-word transliteration, if every word had an easy translation, then context would not matter. But language requires both the meanings of individual words plus where to place a word, or what added ending creates connections among words.
The December 1998 issue of the Atlantic Monthly pinpointed the pressing problems of word order.
The earliest computer translators were even more literal; they were "direct systems," which means they looked up each word or phrase in a lexicon and substituted an equivalent word or phrase in the target language. It ought to have been obvious that this approach had serious shortcomings. But such was the "naive optimism" -- as Eduard Hovy, a researcher at the University of Southern California and the president of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas puts it -- that it took a surprisingly long time for practitioners to realize that they had a lot of work ahead of them to reproduce even passable translations. In the 1950s the surging Cold War demand for translations of thousands of pages of Russian technical articles figured into the exciting belief, held by many computer scientists that the new, programmable computers could duplicate the human mind through "artificial intelligence.... [The Rockefeller Foundation] wanted a machine that would explore how people think....Compounding the naivete was a simplistic analogy advanced by Norbert Wiener, a brilliant and eccentric mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was at the forefront of computer theory: computers were used during the war to help break enemy codes; decoding is a matter of transforming a set of symbols; language translation could be the same....Of course, it isn't. One huge snag is word order. Forty to 50 percent of the words in a typical English sentence end up in a different position in the corresponding French sentence....Getting the word order wrong not only makes for horrible-sounding sentences but also can change meaning, often in comic ways. (Bold typeface from theExact Word.®) Atlantic Monthly, "Lost in Translation," Stephen Budiansky, December, 1998, page 82
theExact Word® seeks partners, grants, and funding to parallel the work completed in English with the context structures of other languages. theExact Word® seeks to augment, not replace, data-base or search-engine architecture already done in other languages.
Go to the Heart of the Matter--Machine
Translation
Go the Brainy Read--Machine
Translation