Language Translators By: Henry Zaremba

Origins of Translator Technology ▫1954- IBM gives a demo of a translation program called the “Georgetown-IBM experiment”  250 words in Russian; 6 grammatical rules ▫The database was a 16” disk  Data was stored only on the outside 4-inches ▫Verbatim translation

Mark I The first machine was unveiled in 1959 Operation of the “Mark I” involved hand copying text onto a punch card in order to input it into the machine Broke words down into pieces that were recombined The machine did not give very accurate translations

Mark II Upgraded version of “Mark I” developed in 1960 Larger database and faster processing Had an “optical character reader” so words didn’t have to be changed into another form for the computer to read them

Computer Assisted Translation Not limited to purely language translators ▫Spell and Grammar Checkers ▫Translation memory management ▫Human-aided machine translation ▫Search engines that can search translated texts in addition to those originally in the source language

Transparency vs. Faithfulness Faithfulness- degree to which a translation correctly keeps the meaning of the source text Transparency- degree to which a translation sounds like a natural phrase or sentence in the target language

Google Translate I am going to the store

Modern Types of Machine Translators Rule-based Machine Translation ▫Linguistic approach Statistical Machine Translation ▫Based on a matrix of words in 2 languages Example-based Machine Translation ▫Translation by analogy

Hybrid Machine Translation Attempts to use the strengths of both Rule-based and Statistical translation ▫1. Rules post-processed by statistics ▫2. Statistics guided by rules

Challenges Disambiguation ▫Translating words with 2 or more meanings Name Recognition ▫As well as other specific nouns

Available Machine Translators Free online- ▫Google translate, Anuusaraka Commercially available Software ▫Babylon ($116.40), IdiomaX ($149.95)

Works Cited Google Translate. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr O’Grady, William, et al. Contemporary Linguistics. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print. Rev. of Babylon Language Translation Software. Top Ten Reviews.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr “Translation.” Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Apr