Several years ago technology advanced enough to produce systems that could take words in one language and substitute them by their equivalent in a different language. It was the beginning of Machine Translation, and many feared it would substitute human translators. So far, programmes have improved but translator are still necessary. Will this change in a more or less distant future?
At the innitial moment, machines could only substitute words without interpreting them. The next step was to attempt mere complex texts and sequences of words. The corpora helped machines recognise phrases, translate idioms or identify types of words. In this moment translation software limits the score of permited substitutions which makes systems much more effective. If the language is formulaic, as in legal documents for instance, the results are astonishing good but problems arise in more literary texts.
However, translators are still necessary. Machines cannot fully understand and translate some expressions, puns, idioms or simply the intention of the author. Besides, it is not always possible to get an exact equivalence from one language to another. Nowadays, it is common for human translators to start translating with machines and correct what they have done. But the final approach, the human touch, is only understood by other humans. So, unless a software that allows machines to think by themselves is invented machine translators will never replace people.
Bibliography
Lenssen, Philipp, “Google Translator: The Universal Language,” Google Blogoscoped, http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html , 2005, (accessed April 15, 2008 )
Wikipedia contributors, “Dictionary-based machine translation,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dictionary-based_machine_translation&oldid=183145791 (accessed April 15, 2008 )
Wikipedia contributors, “Machine translation,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=205089471 (accessed April 15, 2008 )
Wikipedia contributors, “Statistical machine translation,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Statistical_machine_translation&oldid=202036737 (accessed April 15, 2008 )
I totally agree with you. Although automated translation has improved considerably, human input will always be necessary. Or as professional translators and interpreters, so we like to think…
dubiousness says : I absolutely agree with this !