The Development And Evolution Of Machine Translation

We seem to be inevitably entering a new era known as the “Global era” to many. Technology has made globalisation so transverse, that pecking your child goodnight to sharing experiences with loved ones feel material.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boy! Have I got an amazing story to tell you? We are travelling the world and meeting new people from where we stand or sit without flexing a muscle only by the twiddle of thumbs here, a click of a mouse there. On the downside, this masks our ability to connect and have that human contact and interaction. Well I thought we all know how translation is such an important thing in breaking language barrier through the conversion of one language to another while keeping the meaning unchanged.

However, we might be born knowing the best way to communicate with people though we must learn to talk, read and communicate in other ways by observing the people around us who teach through instruction and imitate examples.

As language relates to diverse cultures and ethnicities, language barrier is a ball and chain to advancing our stories to share with the next person. I wouldn’t imagine having a translator present at a dinner for two, well most confident enough in the third party but I for one wouldn’t let the thought cross my mind, like herding cats!

The tech era grants us these amazing functions that the moment I figured out existed, was amazing experience. Watching your original written text turn into a different language thanks to “Google Translate,” made me understand leeway the world has to offer. However, computer programs produce translations, yet no perfect for that is an ideal to which no human translator can have a particular ambition. Fine-points and ‘shades’ of poetry are beyond computational analysis, vagueness in human language is what only human mind can decode. Machine translation has long been criticised by many for various reasons including inaccuracy, lack of cultural rich, failure to handle minority languages among other reasons.

No wonder I am boring you with all these stories yet the concept is still uncovered! Fine let us see some facts here.

What is Machine Translation?

To begin with, According to Asher and Koerner ed. (1995), Machine translation refers to computerised systems responsible for the production of translations with or without human assistance. It excludes computer-based translation tools which support translators by providing access to on-line dictionaries, remote terminology databanks, transmission and reception of texts, etc.
Machine translation may differ from human output which are normally revised by a second translator as machine translation may be prone to mistakes, however machine translation output serves as a rough draft for a human translator

There is room for improvement for the machine translation systems by developing more sophisticated programs or methods or imposing restrictions on the input. Deal with texts limited to the sublanguage or of a particular subject field or document type such as biochemical report or a patent. The machine translation system was originally designed either for two particular languages (bilingual systems) or for more than a single pair of languages (multilingual systems).

In the beginning, the use of mechanical dictionaries to overcome the barriers of language was first suggested in the 17th century. However, it was not until the 20th century that the first concrete proposals were made in patents issued independently in 1933 by George Artsrouni. A storage device on a paper tape which could be used to find the equivalent of any word in another language, prototype demonstrated in1937.

Troyanskii in hind sight delivered more significant envisioning 3 stages of mechanical translation:

• An editor knowing only the source language was to undertake logical analysis of words into their base forms and syntactic functions
• The machine was to transform sequences of base forms and functions into equivalent sequences in the target language
• Another editor knowing only the target language was to convert this output into the normal forms of his own language.

How Machine Translation Began
The possibility of using computers for translation was first discussed by Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation and Andrew D. Booth a British crystallographer. Booth began collaborations with a one Richard H.Richens (Cambridge), who had independently been using punched cards to produce crude word-for-word translations of scientific abstracts.

The first public demonstration at Georgetown University, Leon Dostert collaborated with IBM of a Machine Translation system in

January 1954.
So, Warren weaver in 1949 proposed the idea of use of computers in translation adopting the term computer translation.

1954: the development of the first automatic translator by a group of researchers from Georgetown in collaboration with IBM.

1954: Victor Yngve published the first journal on Machine translation “Mechanical Translation devoted to the translation of languages by the aid of machines”

Second period (1960 – 1966) Parsing and disillusionment

1961: In February of this year, computational linguistics is born thanks to weekly lectures organised by David G. Hays at the Rand Corporation in Los Angeles.

1964: the creation of ALPAC committee (Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee) which studied the perspectives and chances of machine translation

1966: ALPAC concluded its report having a negative impact on their search on Machine translation.
Third period (1966 – 1980): New birth and hope

1970: start of project REVERSO, development of system SYSTRAN1

1976: creation of system WEATHER in TAUM project

1978: creation of system ATLAS2 by Japanese firm FUJITSU able to translate from Korean to Japanese and vice versa

Fourth period (1980 – 1990): Japanese Invaders

1982: Japanese firm SHARP markets its automatic translator DUET (English-Japanese)

1983: NEC develops its own system based on algorithm called PIVOT.

1986: development of PENSEE by OK13 Japanese – English translator

1986: Hitachi group developed its own system christened HICATS (Hitachi Computer Aided Translation System / Japanese – English)
Fifth period (since 1990): the web and the new vague of translators

1993: The project C-STAR (Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research) is an international cooperation. The theme of project was MT of the parole in the field of tourism by video conference giving birth to system C-STAR1 which dealt with English, German and Japanese.

1998: marketing of the REVERSO translator by company Softissimo.

2000: development of system ALPH by Japanese laboratory ATR

2005: The appearances of the first web site for automatic translation like Google; Google translate.

2007: METIS-II a hybrid based machine translation system
2008: 23% of internet users have used MT

2009: 30% of the professionals have used MT and 18% perform a proofreading

2010 – Up to date, we have many users of all calibre making use of the machine translation systems.