Postgraduate Diploma in Translation

Postgraduate Diplomain Translation Machine Translation I Introduction to MT

Outline • Translation • Machine Translation (MT) • Why MT is important • MT and the Human Translator Diploma in Translation I

Why Translation is Difficult

What is Translation? • The process of transforming text from one language into a text in another language that is, • in some sense, equivalent to that in a first language • in some sense, a good text in its own right. • It is what translators do.... Diploma in Translation I

As recently as a decade ago it was widely believed that infectious disease was no longer much of a threat in the developed world. The remaining challenges to public health there, it was thought, stemmed from noninfectious conditions such as cancer, heart disease and degenerative diseases. Il y a une dizaine d’annees, on croyait que les pays industrialises etait debarasses des risques lies aux maladies infectieuses et que la sante publique n’etait menacee que par des maladies comme le cancer, les troubles cardiaques, et les anomolies genetiques What Translators Actually Do:An Example of En/Fr Translation Diploma in Translation I

English Two sentences infectious disease was no longer much of a threat in the developed world The remaining challenges to public health there noninfectious conditions French One sentence les pays industrialises etait debarasses des risques lies aux maladies infectieuses la sante publique n’etait menacee que maladies Problems: style and meaning Diploma in Translation I

Translation • These tasks are extremely difficult. • They are more than what we expect of a human translator, let alone a computer. • The work of human translators is typically multi-stage. Diploma in Translation I

Pre-editing Translation Post-editing Translation Workflow LANGUAGE RESOURCES ?? Diploma in Translation I

Pre-editing Translation Post-editing Translation Workflow LANGUAGE RESOURCES dictionaries grammars terminology existing translations Diploma in Translation I

Translation Workflow • No pre-editing  Lots of post-editing! • Lots of pre-editing  Less post-editing! • GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT!!! Diploma in Translation I

Translation Workflow: Pre-editing • Text Preparation • Delimitation of what is to be translated • Representation in electronic form • Spelling correction • Stylistic guidelines, e.g. • avoidance of long sentences • avoidance of ambiguous terms • Use of controlled languages and related tools • Grammar Checkers • Critiquing Systems Diploma in Translation I

Translation Workflow • Coordination of a large translation job • Distribution of task to several translators • Integration of results • Communication of between translators and cooordinator • Availability of language resources • Grammar • Dictionaries • Terminology • Existing translations Diploma in Translation I

Controlled Languages • Average number of words used by native speaker – 75,000. • Basic English, invented by Ogden (1930). Vocabulary size 850. • Simplified constructions e.g. ``make perfect'' instead of ``perfect''. • Learn English – seven years • Learn Esperanto – seven months • Learn BE – seven weeks • Some industries have introduced controlled languages for their manuals. • Xerox offers its technical writers one-day course, British Aerospace does the same in a few short sessions Diploma in Translation I

Translational Equivalence • Lexical Mismatches • Cultural Mismatches • Grammatical/Structural Mismatches • Structural/Semantic Mismatches • Role of Context Diploma in Translation I

English ? spam friend truck lorry just French Alpe ? ami amie camion venir de Lexical Mismatches Diploma in Translation I

Words with Many Senses Hutchins & Somers (1992) Diploma in Translation I

Cultural Mismatches English: Health Insurance French: Assurance Maladie English: validate French: oblitérer Diploma in Translation I

It's no good closing the barn door afterthe horse has bolted Moutarde après le dîner Cultural Mismatches Diploma in Translation I

I miss you I like sausages tu me manques Ich habe wursten gern Grammatical/Structural Mismatches Diploma in Translation I

Structural/Semantic Mismatches • Head marking. • In English possessive relation is marked on the owner: The man's house • In Hungarian it is marked on the dependent:The man house-his • his house / sa maison • Direction and manner of motion marking • He ran into the room (English) • He entered the room running (French) Diploma in Translation I

OPEN OPEN Contextual Interpretation ouvre ouvert Diploma in Translation I

Structural Ambiguity • I forgot how good beer tastes • Time flies like an arrow • I bought a car with four doors/liri • The councillors refused the women a permit because they advocated/feared violence. Diploma in Translation I

Differences Lexical Marking of semantic distinctions Morphology English Maltese German Word order Similarities Communicative function for survival Mechanisms for reference to people, eating, politeness, time. Nouns Verbs Similarities and Differences Between Languages Diploma in Translation I

Morphology • try, tries, tried, trying • nikteb, tikteb, jikteb, jiktebt, niktbu,... • uygarlastiramadimizdanmisiklarsinizcasma • behaving as if you are amongst those whom we could not cause to become civilized Diploma in Translation I

Differences in Word Order • SVO (English)The man kicked the ball • SOV (Japanese)The man the ball kicked • VSO (Classical Arabic)Kicked the man the ball • Mixed (German)The man who the sausage ate did. • Free word order (Latin) Diploma in Translation I

Summary • Translation concerns translational equivence • This transcends equivalence of meaning (e.g. sometimes involves cultural conventions) • Translation may involve the resolution of ambiguity. • It makes sense to talk about the distance between languages. Languages which are close are easier to translate. • Translation is a hard problem – for humans let alone machines. Diploma in Translation I

Why Machine Translation is Important

Implications of Multilinguality Diploma in Translation I

Commerical Interest • US has invested in MT for intelligence purposes • MT is popular on the web - the most ued of Google's special features • EU spends more that €1B per annum on translation Diploma in Translation I

Academic Interest • Different NL technologies include • parsing • generation • morphology • pronoun resolution • understanding ... Diploma in Translation I

Misconceptions about MT • MT is a waste of time because • you will never make a machine that can translate Shakespeare. • the quality of translation you can get from an MT system is very low • MT threatens the jobs of translators. • MT systems are machines, and buying an MT system should be very much like buying a car. Diploma in Translation I

Facts about MT • There are many situations where the ability to produce reliable, if less than perfect, translations at high speed is valuable. • MT systems can take over some of the boring, repetitive translation jobs and allow human translation to concentrate on more interesting specialist tasks. • Building an MT system is an arduous and time consuming job, involving the construction of grammars and very large monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. Diploma in Translation I

The Place for MT • Human Translators are good at: • Getting the right turn of phrase • Preserving translation equivalence • Human Translators are bad at • Dictionary look-up • Consistency of translation • Translation of terminology • MT can exploit these weaknesses Diploma in Translation I

Summary MT is important because • There are too few human translators • Availability of materials in appropriate language has significant economic consequences. • Scientifically, it is still one of the best test areas for language technology Diploma in Translation I

Machine Translation and Human Translators

Different Styles of MT • FAMT: fully automatic machine translation • FAHQMT • FALQMT • MAHT: machine aided human translation • HAMT: human aided machine translation Diploma in Translation I

The Dream of FAMT • Fully Automatic (High Quality) Machine Translation (Bar Hillel 1960) FAHQMT Source Language text TargetLanguage text Diploma in Translation I

FAMT • Basic Charactistics • No human intervention • Arbitrary text • Evaluation Criteria • Quality of ouput • Cost ($/page) • Speed (pages/hour) Diploma in Translation I

FAMT Success StoryTAUM METEO • Written by Chevalier et al. 1978. • Translation of weather reports from English to French • Highly constrained subset of English: • Small number of senses for each word • Restricted syntactic constructions • System determines whether a given sentence is within its capabilities • Very fast, very accurate, no post-editing Diploma in Translation I

FAMT: MORAL • FAMT can work well but only if we give up one or more of the goals e.g. • Unrestricted text input • High quality translation • This observation has lead to research on sublanguages • And to the use of FALQT Diploma in Translation I

Sublanguages • Restricted domain of reference • Restricted purpose and orientation • Restricted mode of communication (may include bandwidth considerations) • Community of users sharing specialised knowledge • Examples: Weather reports; financial reports; car accident reports Diploma in Translation I

Stock Market Report (ToM) • Back to the Malta Stock Exchange: it was a positive week with gainers outpacing losers 6-3, and large cap stocks regaining popularity. Equity turnover by value topped the Lm600,000 mark by a comfortable margin for the second time this year and the MSE index closed the week at 5,123.766, up 1.5%.BoV opened the week flat at Lm3.651 but advanced steadily on sustained buying activity to close at Lm3.68. The positive mood extended into Tuesday as the price climbed further, closing at Lm3.70. Diploma in Translation I

Fully Automatic Low Quality Translation – (FALQT) • Can be used where translation volume is high. • Where the gist is more important than an accurate translation • Where we need to select a small group of documents from a large collection for subsequent high quality translation. • Must answer question: could document X in collection Z be about Y? Diploma in Translation I

En 2000-01, le recouvrement des couts mettra l'emphase sur la reduction des comptes a recevoir et la mise en place d'un programme de verification aupres des firmes ayant demande une reduction des frais. En 2000-01, le budget du programme devrait augmenter substantiellement dua des nouvelles initiatives du cote appropriation. In 2000-01, the covering of the costs will put the emphase on the reduction of the accounts receivable and the installation of a programme of checking near the firms having required a reduction of the expenses. In 2000-01, the budget of the program should increase substantially due to new initiatives on the side appropriation. Google Translation Diploma in Translation I

FAMT is not the only way • FAMT lies at one extreme of a continuum of ways in which technology can be brought to bear upon the translation problem • At the other extreme there are word processing software, fax machines, and even mobile phones • Between these two extremes there are other points of interest where technology can radically affect the productivity of the individual translator. Diploma in Translation I

MAHT and HAMT • Machine Aided Human Translation (MAHT) • Human Aided Machine Translation (HAMT). • The essential difference between these two lies not only in the way in which the person is involved but also in the extent of their involvement Diploma in Translation I

MAHT • All initiative resides with the human. • Often based on a text editor with certain translation-specific functionalities such as • Simultaneous access to source and target texts • Online access to dictionaries, thesauri, terminological databases, and word concordance tools. • Identification of and access to secondary materials such as texts being worked on and other texts like it in both source and target forms. Diploma in Translation I

MAHT - Translation Memories • Systems consist of a database in which each source sentence of a translation is stored together with the target sentence (this is called a translation memory "unit") • Any new source sentences will be searched for in the database and a match value is calculated. • When the match value is 100%, the translation of the source sentence from the database is inserted into the text being translated. Diploma in Translation I

MAHT - Translation Memories • If the match value is below 100% and above a certain user-definable percentage (i.e., "fuzzy match"), the old translation will be inserted as a translation proposal for the translator to review and edit. • Sentences with match values below that margin have to be translated from scratch. • New and changed translation proposals will then be stored in the database for future use. Diploma in Translation I

MAHT - Translation Memories – Advantages • Avoid redoing translation of repeated material • Use previous texts as a model for new translations • Ensure consistency throughout a translation Diploma in Translation I

Postgraduate Diploma in Translation