TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES - A COMPARISON BETWEEN HUMAN AND MACHINE TRANSLATION by

TRANSLATION is treated as a species of formal transformation of symbols. Everything symbolized by a set of symbols constitutes the domain of symbolization of the set. The ultimate elements of the domain which symbolize nothing further are designated the terminal indicatum. Most domains of symbolization comprise mediate symbols which are both symbolized by other symbols and themselves indicate further symbols. Mental concepts are treated as symbols. In translation, a set of symbols is transformed to another set in another language, the two sets having terminal indicata that only differ within narrow limits. Different kinds of translation can be differentiated on the basis of the extent to which the mediate symbols of the domains of symbolization of the input and output passages are similar. Human translators utilize many categories of symbols and display great flexibility in their choice of procedure for translating and in their choice of criteria for ascertaining the significance of symbols of multiple use. Machine translation (MT) is much less flexible though most of the symbols used by human translators, with the exception of auditory symbols, phonemes and uttered-word segments, have analogues in MT. Different types of input passage require different translation procedures, in particular with reference to the relative roles played by syntactic and semantic analysis. Closer formal resemblances may occur between human translation and MT procedures for the same type of input than between the procedures of either the human translation or MT confronted with input passages of various types. While the over-all performance of the human translator is unlikely to be approached in the near future by MT, the latter may accomplish certain individual translation operations more efficiently than its human counterpart, and, on occasion, produce a better translation.