MACHINE TRANSLATION (Q3)

Machine translation, sometimes used like MT, is a sub-field of the computational linguistic that investigates the use of the informatics programs to translate a text from a natural language to another. In its basic level, MT makes only a substitution of the words in a natural language for the words in another language. More complicated translations can be made by using text corpus, which makes possible to recognise sentences and to translate idioms, for example. Machine translation can be made based is rules, in the corpus or in the context.

Nowadays translation is very important, because of the high quantity of information and the necessity of translinguistic communication.

Translation between romantic languages like Spanish and Portuguese has a very good quality, but this changes if the languages are typologically very different, like Spanish and English. Another thing that influences the quality of the translation is how specialised the text is. If a translator is specialised in meteorological texts, it will not be valid to translate a sportive text.

When translating a text, you have to take in account the morphology, the syntactic and the semantic, and also the style and pragmatic. Nowadays the tendency is to integrate all the methodologies; linguistics, statistics and others in the data vase of a corpus.

On-line machine translators
o OpenTrad
o Systran
o ProMT
o Lucy
o Google Traductor
o Translated
o WorldLingo

References

* From wikipediua the free encyclopedia, from the article traduccion automatica, retrieved on april 30, 2009 at 11:47