What do they mean?

-Machine translation,  is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.  MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another. Using corpus techniques, attemps more complex translations , allowing for better handling of differences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition, and translation of idioms, as well as the isolation of anomalies.

-Machine aided Translation , where translation proper is performed by a computer, even if the human helps by preediting, postediting, or answering questions to disambiguate the source text. In Computer-Aided Translation, or more precisely Machine-Aided Human Translation (MAHT), by contrast, translation is performed by a human, and the computer offers supporting tools.

-Multilingual Content Management systems contain information, mostly in the form of more or less structured text documents, but potentially also including audio clips, video clips and images. Minimally, such a system provides mechanisms for storage and retrieval of content data, but it may also give support for indexing of documents, distributed document editing, version management, and generation of different views and guided tours. 

Finally…

-Translation technology is the type of technology that offers translation between two languages. It’s aim is to make simultaneous translations between oral language to another languages.  Researchers  revealed a directional speaker system that delivers a translated audio feed to just one person in a room, removing the need for them to wear headphones. And another concept device projected translated subtitles along the bottom of one lens of a modified pair of glasses.

 

 

 

 

Sources:

-Machine translation. (2008, April 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved  April 9, 2008,11.50 from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=203927830

-MCM Project, Multilingual Content Management, Vaxjo University (WSCC); april 10 12.00http://wscc.info/index.php?show=53044_SWE&&page_anchor=http://wscc.info/p53044/p53044_swe.php

-Kitsite, Multilingual Content Management (2007); april 10 12.05 http://www.kitsite.com/articles/multilingual-content-management.html

-Christian Boitet, 8.4 Machine-aided Human Translation; kontsulta: april 12 13.40 http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/ch8node6.html

-Will Knight, NewScientist.com news service, Live speech-translation technology unveiled 18:05 31 October 2005; april 12 12.38 http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8241

 

Translation examples between related languages

Example of a translation from Galician to a related language as it is the Spanish:

Oito galegos secuestrados en Somalia

Catro persoas lograron acceder ao atuneiro vasco armados con lanzagranadas e manteñen retida á tripulación do ‘Praia Bakio’, composta por 13 persoas de orixe africana, oito galegos e cinco vascos. As autoridades españolas non teñen constancia de que ningún dos 26 resulte ferido durante o asalto.
A pesar de que o atuneiro sufriu danos materiais durante o asalto, os danos non impiden o seu navegabilidad e gobernabilidade e, segundo o seguimento que se lle está facendo, os primeiros indicios apuntan a que o buque diríxese cara a terra firme.

Ocho gallegos secuestrados en Somalia

Cuatro personas lograron acceder al atunero vasco armados con lanzagranadas y mantienen retenida a la tripulación del ‘Playa Bakio’, compuesta por 13 personas de origen africana, ocho gallegos y cinco vascos. Las autoridades españolas no tienen constancia de que ninguno de los 26 resulte herido durante el asalto.
A pesar de que el atunero sufrió daños materiales durante el asalto, los daños no impiden su navegabilidad y gobernabilidad y, según el seguimiento que se le está haciendo, los primeros indicios apuntan a que el buque se dirige cara a tierra firme.

As it can be seen, there is only one mistake in the translation so it can be said that it is easier to make translations with good results between related languages, on the other hand, translation between less related languages have usually typical grammatical, syntactical or word-order flaws.

Sources:

-Comprendium translator 21 april 2008, 12:57 from [(http://www.translendium.net:8080/home/text.do;jsessionid=E9A5ABD30639A486D97FC1824833274F)

-A Nosa Terra diario 21 april 2008, 12.30 from http://www.anosaterra.org/nova/oito-galegos-secuestrados-en-somalia-.html



1st translation example applied to less related languages ( Elnglish -to- Spanish)

The followings are the MT systems I have used and the translations I have made by using different web pages that offer quite a good range of possibilities to make them possible:

Resultado de la traducción:

Texto original: “Tough sentence for gun possession welcomed(1) The Leader of Nottingham City Council has welcomed a lengthy jail sentence handed down to a man caught with a loaded gun in Nottingham.(2) Councillor Jon Collins said he hoped it would act as a deterrent to others considering carrying guns. Makan Dayil, 28, of Beardsley Gardens, The Meadows, was jailed for ten years following his conviction at Nottingham Crown Court for possessing the gun and ammunition, after police(3) found a revolver loaded with five bullets in his car on Queens Drive, Nottingham, on(4) August 29, last year.” Texto traducido: “Oración resistente para la posesión del arma dada la bienvenida El líder del consejo de ciudad de Nottingham ha dado la bienvenida a una oración de cárcel muy larga dada abajo a un hombre cogido con un arma cargado en Nottingham. El concejal Jon Collins dijo él esperaba que actuara como impedimento a otros que consideran el llevar de los armas. Makan Dayil, 28, de los jardines de Beardsley, los prados, fue encarcelado por diez años que seguían su convicción en la corte de la corona de Nottingham para poseer el arma y la munición, después de que el policía encontrara un revólver cargado con cinco balas en su coche en reinas conduzca, Nottingham, de agosto el 29, el año pasado”.

-There are some obvious errors in the translation:

1. The headline of the article has been wrongly translated:
   • “sentence” in this case does not mean “oración” but it does mean ” sentencia”.
   • “thought” in this case does not mean “resistente” “but does mean ”dura”.
   • “for” has been wrongly translated into “para” instead of “por”.

2. In the first paragraph :

• “sentence” in this case does not mean “oración” but it does mean ” sentencia”.

• • “handed down” has been wrongly translated into “dada abajo” instead of “dada”.
  • “caught” has been wrongly translated into ”cogido” instead of “pillado”.
  • the adjective “loaded” has been translated as if it was masculine but it is femenine in this translation of “loaded gun” = “arma cargadA”.

3. In the third paragraph:

• • “police” = “el policía” has been translated as if it was a single noun but it is a colective noun “polocía” = ” La policía”.
  • The preposotion “on” has been wrongly translated into “de” instead of “el”.

 

 

 

Sources:

-Nottingham City Council “Tough sentence for gun possesion welcomed”, April 16 12:00 from [(http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/news_page/news_about_nottingham_-_policing_and_public_safety_/tough_sentence_for_gun_possession_welcomed.htm)

-Instituto Cervantes- Servicio de traducción automática interactivo16 april 2008, 12:00 from http://oesi.cervantes.es/traduccionAutomatica.html

Characteristics of a translation task according to the FEMTI report

The characteristics of the translation task refers to the information flow intended for the output, from the point of view of the agent who receives the translation.

From the point of view of the FEMTI or Framework for the Evaluation of Machine Translation in ISLE the main characteristics of a translation task are these three ones:

1. Assimilation: The ultimate purpose of the assimilation task (of which translation forms a part) is to monitor a relatively large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in usually several languages.
2. Dissemination: The ultimate aim of dissemination is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization.
3. Communication: The purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage.

 

Sources:

-FEMTI – a Framework for the Evaluation of Machine Translation in ISLE, April 7, 12,10 from http://www.issco.unige.ch:8080/cocoon/femti/st-home.html

Hans Uszkoreit

Hans Uszkoreit is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence where he heads the Language Technology Lab. By cooptation he is also Professor of the Computer Science Department.

Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. During his time in Austin he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center. In 1984 Uszkoreit received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas. From 1982 until 1986, he worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, Ca. During this time he was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University as a senior researcher and later as a project leader.

In 1988 Uszkoreit was appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he became the head of the newly founded Language Technology Lab at DFKI. He has been a co-founder and principal investigator of the Special Collaborative Research Division “Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Processes” of the DFG (German Science Foundation). He is also co-founder and professor of the “European Postgraduate Program Language Technology and Cognitive Systems”, a joint Ph.D. program with the University of Edinburgh.

Here are some of his recent publications:

• Uszkoreit, H. (2007) Methods and Applications for Relation Detection. In: Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing, 2007.

• Uszkoreit, H. F. Xu, W. Liu (2007) Challenges and Solutions of Multilingual and Translingual Information Service Systems, To appear in Proceedings of HCI International 2007, 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Beijing, 2007.

• Uszkoreit, H., F. Xu, Weiquan Liu, J. Steffen, I. Aslan, J. Liu, C. Müller, B. Holtkamp, M. Wojciechowski (2007)

• Xu F., H. Uszkoreit, H. Li (2007) A Seed-driven Bottom-up Machine Learning Framework for Extracting Relations of Various Complexity, To appear in: Proceedings of ACL 07, Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Prague 2007.
  

• Frank, A., H.-U. Krieger, F. Xu, H. Uszkoreit, B. Crysmann, B. Jörg, U. Schäfer (2007): Question Answering from Structured Knowledge Resources. In: Journal of Applied Logic, Volume 5, Issue 1, March 2007, Pages 20-48
  

• Jörg, B., M. Jermol, H. Uszkoreit, M. Grobelnik, J. Ferlezˇ. (2006) Analytic Information Services for the European Research Area. To appear In Proceedings: eChallenges2006 e-2006 Conference, October 25-27, 2006. Barcelona, Spain.

Sources:

http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/%7Ehansu/

http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/%7Ehansu/publ.html