History of Machine Translation

The idea of machine translation may be traced back to the 17th century. In
1629, Ren Descartes proposed a universal language, with equivalent ideas in different
tongues sharing one symbol. The field of "machine translation" appeared in Warren
Weaver's Memorandum on Translation (1949). The first researcher in the field, Yehosha
Bar-Hillel, began his research at MIT (1951). A Georgetown MT research team followed
(1951) with a public demonstration of its system in 1954. MT research programs popped
up in Japan and Russia (1955), and the first MT conference was held in London (1956).
Researchers continued to join the field as the Association for Machine Translation and
Computational Linguistics was formed in the U.S. (1962) and the National Academy of
Sciences formed the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to
study MT (1964). Real progress was much slower, however, and after the ALPAC
report (1966), which found that the ten-year-long research had failed to fulfill expectations,
funding was greatly reduced.
The French Textile Institute also used MT to translate abstracts from and into
French, English, German and Spanish (1970); Brigham Young University started a project
to translate Mormon texts by automated translation (1971); and Xerox used SYSTRAN to
translate technical manuals (1978). Beginning in the late 1980s, as computational power
increased and became less expensive, more interest was shown in statistical models for
machine translation. Various MT companies were launched, including Trados (1984),
which was the first to develop and market translation memory technology (1989). The first
commercial MT system for Russian/ English / German-Ukrainian was developed at
Kharkov State University (1991).
MT on the web started with SYSTRAN Offering free translation of small texts
(1996), followed by AltaVista Babelfish, which racked up 500,000 requests a day (1997).
Franz-Josef Och (the future head of Translation Development AT Google) won DARPA's
speed MT competition (2003). More innovations during this time included MOSES, the
open-source statistical MT engine (2007), a text/SMS translation service for mobiles in
Japan (2008), and a mobile phone with built-in speech-to-speech translation functionality
for English, Japanese and Chinese (2009). Recently, Google announced that Google
Translate translates roughly enough text to fill 1 million books in one day (2012).
The idea of using digital computers for translation of natural languages was
proposed as early as 1946 by A. D. Booth and possibly others. Warren Weaver wrote an
important memorandum "Translation" in 1949. The Georgetown experiment was by no
means the first such application, and a demonstration was made in 1954 on
the APEXC machine atBirkbeck College (University of London) of a rudimentary
translation of English into French. Several papers on the topic were published at the time,
and even articles in popular journals (see for example Wireless World, Sept. 1955, Cleave
and Zacharov). A similar application, also pioneered at Birkbeck College at the time, was
reading and composingBraille texts by computer.

Machine Translation
Machine translation is the translation of text by a computer, with no human
involvement. Pioneered in the 1950s, machine translation can also be referred to as
automated translation, automatic or instant translation.
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of
computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech
from one natural language to another. Also Machine translation (MT) is the application of
computers to the task of translating texts from one natural language to another. One of the
very earliest pursuits in computer science, MT has proved to be an elusive goal, but today
a reasonable number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect,
is of sufficient quality to be useful in a number of specific domains.
There are two types of machine translation system:
Rule-Based Machine Translation Technology
Rule-based machine translation relies on countless built-in linguistic rules and
millions of bilingual dictionaries for each language pair.
The software parses text and creates a transitional representation from which the
text in the target language is generated. This process requires extensive lexicons with
morphological, syntactic, and semantic information, and large sets of rules. The software
uses these complex rule sets and then transfers the grammatical structure of the source
language into the target language.
Translations are built on gigantic dictionaries and sophisticated linguistic rules.
Users can improve the out-of-the-box translation quality by adding their terminology into
the translation process. They create user-defined dictionaries which override the systems
default settings.
Statistical Machine Translation Technology
Statistical machine translation utilizes statistical translation models whose
parameters stem from the analysis of monolingual and bilingual corpora. Building
statistical translation models is a quick process, but the technology relies heavily on
existing multilingual corpora. A minimum of 2 million words for a specific domain and even
more for general language are required. Theoretically it is possible to reach the quality
threshold but most companies do not have such large amounts of existing multilingual
corpora to build the necessary translation models. Additionally, statistical machine
translation is CPU intensive and requires an extensive hardware configuration to run
translation models for average performance levels.
Using machine translation as a teaching tool
Although there have been concerns of machine translation's accuracy, Dr. Ana
Nino of the University of Manchester has researched some of the advantages in utilizing
machine translation in the classroom. One such pedagogical method is called using "MT
as a Bad Model." MT as a Bad Model forces the language learner to identify
inconsistencies or incorrect aspects of a translation; in turn, the individual will (hopefully)
possess a better grasp of the language. Dr. Nino cites that this teaching tool was
implemented in the late 1980s. At the end of various semesters, Dr. Nino was able to
obtain survey results from students who had used MT as a Bad Model (as well as other
models.) Overwhelmingly, students felt that they had observed improved comprehension,
lexical retrieval, and increased confidence in their target language.
Also we can use an Enterprise Machine Translation (EMT)that is a machine
translation technology that has been enhanced to deliver a significant added value to
enterprise globalization initiatives. Enterprise MT technology provides high quality
automated translation, tuned to each companys and industrys language. Using Enterprise
MT, enterprises can remove inefficiencies and create new multi-lingual processes and
assets. Only with high quality Enterprise MT, can globalization teams drive down their
translation costs, accelerate products launch to market and help increase visibility of their
brand in global markets.
Advantage and disadvantage of use a Machine translation
Increased productivity deliver translations faster
Use freely available machine translation to pre-translate new segments that are not
leveraged from translation memory.
Connect to and use a customer's or supplier's trained engine through SDL BeGlobal or
use the industry specific machine translation solution SDL Language Cloud Machine
Translation to achieve better quality results every time.
Flexibility and choice to suit all types of project
Select from a number of different machine translation engines.
Choose from over 50 languages and more than 2,500 language pairs to suit your
project.
Compare rules-based and statistical machine translation engines.

Machine translation and signed languages
In the early 2000s, options for machine translation between spoken and signed
languages were severely limited. It was a common belief that deaf individuals could use
traditional translators. However, stress, intonation, pitch, and timing are conveyed much
differently in spoken languages compared to signed languages. Therefore, a deaf
individual may misinterpret or become confused about the meaning of written text that is
based on a spoken language.

Researchers Zhao, et al. (2000), developed a prototype called TEAM (translation
from English to ASL by machine) that completed English to American Sign
Language (ASL) translations. The program would first analyze the syntactic, grammatical,
and morphological aspects of the English text. Following this step, the program accessed
a sign synthesizer, which acted as a dictionary for ASL. This synthesizer housed the
process one must follow to complete ASL signs, as well as the meanings of these signs.
Once the entire text is analyzed and the signs necessary to complete the translation are
located in the synthesizer, a computer generated human appeared and would use ASL to
sign the English text to the user.
Conclusion
This Machine Translation series will continue with more in-depth blogs on the
technology, implementation, use, benefits, and limitations of Machine Translation. We will
also discuss business situations where Machine Translation would and would not be a
practical solution (with supporting case studies) and will explain how Machine Translation
can be built into a translation/localization workflow in a way that helps organizations
achieve their translation goals.









Reference:
Cohen, J. M. (1986), "Translation", Encyclopedia Americana 27, pp. 1215
Hutchins, W. John; Somers, Harold L. (1992). An Introduction to Machine Translation.
London: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-362830-X.
Piron, Claude (1994), Le dfi des langues Du gchis au bon sens [The Language
Challenge: From Chaos to Common Sense] (in French), Paris:
L'Harmattan,ISBN 9782738424327