Machine translation and human translation: in competition or in complementation?

1. Introduction Ever since the idea of using computers to translate natural languages was first proposed in the 1940s and since the first investigations were begun in the 1950s, translators have watched developments either in scorn or in trepidation. Either they have dismissed the very notion that anyone could even believe that translation could be mechanized, or (at the other extreme) they have feared that their profession would be taken over entirely by machines. The first of these attitudes found expression as early as 1951 in a report for Unesco by J.E.Holmström. He believed that from a machine translation (MT) system, " the resulting literary style would be atrocious and fuller of 'howlers' and false values than the worst that any human translator produces ". The reason was that " translation is an art; something which at every step involves personal choice between uncodifiable alternatives; not merely direct substitutions of equated sets of symbols but choices of values dependent for their soundness on the whole antecedent education and personality of the translator " (Holmström 1951). His comments preceded by three years the first tentative demonstration of a small prototype system, and were based on pure speculation. Nevertheless, such comments have been repeated again and again by translators for nearly fifty years, and no doubt they shall be heard again in the next fifty. The second attitude has also persisted to the present day. However, there is now no doubt that computer-based translation systems are not rivals to human translators, but they are aids to enable them to increase productivity in technical translation or they provide means of translating material which no human translator has ever attempted. In this context we must distinguish (1) machine translation (MT), which aims to undertake the whole translation process, but whose output must invariably be revised; (2) computer aids for translators (translation tools), which support the professional translator; and (3) translation systems for the 'occasional' non-translator user, which produce only rough versions to aid comprehension. These differences were not recognised until the late 1980s. The previous assumption had been that MT systems, whether running on a mainframe or a microcomputer, could serve all these functions with greater or lesser success. In part, this failure to identify different needs and to design systems specifically to meet them has contributed to misconceptions about translation technology and its impact for the professional translator.