Machine Translation of Russian Organic Chemical Names into English by Analysis and Resynthesis of the Component Fragments

THE Machine Translation Laboratory of the Georgetown University Institute of Languages and Linguistics has been working for some years on RussianEnglish machine translation. Different approaches to the problem, varying from essentially empirical code-matching techniques to techniques involving complete linguistic analysis, have been investigated and evaluated here. The procedure which was finally adopted and programmed for computers (and by which 100,000 words of Russian scientific prose have been translated) is the so-called GAT procedure, in which the text is submitted to a complete linguistic analysis within the computer. In the GAT procedure, dictionary look-up is a process of matching input items with an alphabetical list ("dictionary") containing Russian word stems or full-form words. When a test item is matched, it is assigned computer codes indicating its morphology, plus certain other codes for later use. Dictionary lookup of this general type is employed by most researchers now doing machine translation, and by many others now developing procedures which may eventually be applied to machine translation.