The field of machine translation (MT) - the automation of translation between human languages - has existed for more than 50 years. MT helped to usher in the field of computational linguistics and has influenced methods and applications in knowledge representation, information theory, and mathematical statistics.
The correct interpretation of Multiword Units (MWUs) is crucial to many applications in Natural Language Processing but is a challenging and complex task. In recent years, the computational treatment of MWUs has received considerable attention but there is much more to be done before we can claim that NLP and Machine Translation (MT) systems process MWUs successfully. This volume provides a general overview of the field with particular reference to Machine Translation and Translation Technology and focuses on languages such as English, Basque, French, Romanian, German, Dutch and Croatian, among others. The chapters of the volume illustrate a variety of topics that address this challenge, such as the use of rule-based approaches, compound splitting techniques, MWU identification methodologies in multilingual applications, and MWU alignment issues.
Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation is of relevance to researchers and program developers in the field of Machine Translation and especially Example-Based Machine Translation, bilingual text processing and cross-linguistic information retrieval. It is also of interest to translation technologists and localisation professionals. Recent Advances in Example-Based Machine Translation fills a void, because it is the first book to tackle the issue of EBMT in depth. It gives a state-of-the-art overview of EBMT techniques and provides a coherent structure in which all aspects of EBMT are embedded. Its contributions are written by long-standing researchers in the field of MT in general, and EBMT in particular. This book can be used in graduate-level courses in machine translation and statistical NLP.
Machine Translation (MT) has become widely used throughout the world as a medium of communication between those who live in different countries and speak different languages. However, translation between distant languages constitutes a challenge for machines. Therefore, translation evaluation is poised to play a significant role in the process of designing and developing effective MT systems. This book evaluates three prominent MT systems, including Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Sakhr, each of which provides translation between English and Arabic. In the book Almahasees scrutinizes the capacity of the three systems in dealing with translation between English and Arabic in a large corpus taken from various domains, including the United Nation (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Arab League, Petra News Agency reports, and two literary texts: The Old Man and the Sea and The Prophet. The evaluation covers holistic analysis to assess the output of the three systems in terms of Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) adequacy and fluency scales. The text also looks at error analysis to evaluate the systems’ output in terms of orthography, lexis, grammar, and semantics at the entire-text level and in terms of lexis, grammar, and semantics at the collocation level. The research findings contained within this volume provide important feedback about the capabilities of the three MT systems with respect to EnglishArabic translation and paves the way for further research on such an important topic. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of translation studies and translation technology.
Post-editing is possibly the oldest form of human-machine cooperation for translation. It has been a common practice for just about as long as operational machine translation systems have existed. Recently, however, there has been a surge of interest in post-editing among the wider user community, partly due to the increasing quality of machine translation output, but also to the availability of free, reliable software for both machine translation and post-editing. As a result, the practices and processes of the translation industry are changing in fundamental ways. This volume is a compilation of work by researchers, developers and practitioners of post-editing, presented at two recent events on post-editing: The first Workshop on Post-editing Technology and Practice, held in conjunction with the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, held in San Diego, in 2012; and the International Workshop on Expertise in Translation and Post-editing Research and Application, held at the Copenhagen Business School, in 2012.