Launched in January 1999 by the European Commission, the website HLTCentral (HLT: Human Language Technologies) gave a short definition of language engineering: "Through language engineering we can find ways of living comfortably with technology. Our knowledge of language can be used to develop systems that recognize speech and writing, understand text well enough to select information, translate between different languages, and generate speech as well as the printed world. By applying such technologies we have the ability to extend the current limits of our use of language. Language enabled products will become an essential and integral part of everyday life."
MACHINE TRANSLATION
= [Quote]
Tim McKenna is an author who thinks and writes about the complexity of truth in a world of flux. He wrote in October 2000: "When software gets good enough for people to chat or talk on the web in real time in different languages, then we will see a whole new world appear before us. Scientists, political activists, businesses and many more groups will be able to communicate immediately without having to go through mediators or translators."
= A definition
Machine translation can be defined as the automated process of translating a text from one language to another language. MT analyzes the text in the source language and automatically generates the corresponding text in the target language. With the lack of any human intervention during the translation process, machine translation (MT) differs from computer-assisted translation (CAT), which involves some interaction between the translator and the computer.
As explained on the website of SYSTRAN, a company specializing in translation software, "machine translation software translates one natural language into another natural language. MT takes into account the grammatical structure of each language and uses rules to transfer the grammatical structure of the source language (text to be translated) into the target language (translated text). MT cannot replace a human translator, nor is it intended to."
The website of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) gives the following definition: "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 number of systems are available which produce output which, if not perfect, is of sufficient quality to be useful for certain specific applications, usually in the domain of technical documentation. In addition, translation software packages which are designed primarily to assist the human translator in the production of translations are enjoying increasing popularity within professional translation organizations."
Machine translation is the earliest type of natural language processing, as stated on the website of Globalink, a company offering language translation software and services: "From the very beginning, machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP) have gone hand-in-hand with the evolution of modern computational technology. The development of the first general-purpose programmable computers during World War II was driven and accelerated by Allied cryptographic efforts to crack the German Enigma machine and other wartime codes. Following the war, the translation and analysis of natural language text provided a testbed for the newly emerging field of Information Theory.
During the 1950s, research on Automatic Translation (known today as Machine Translation, or 'MT') took form in the sense of literal translation, more commonly known as word-for-word translations, without the use of any linguistic rules. The Russian project initiated at Georgetown University in the early 1950s represented the first systematic attempt to create a demonstrable machine translation system. Throughout the decade and into the 1960s, a number of similar university and government-funded research efforts took place in the United States and Europe. At the same time, rapid developments in the field of Theoretical Linguistics, culminating in the publication of Noam Chomsky's "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965), revolutionized the framework for the discussion and understanding of the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of human language.