Machine Translation already does Work

The first difficulty in answering a question like "Does machine translation work is that the question itself is ill-posed. It takes for granted that there is one single thing called machine translation and that everyone is agreed about what it is. But in fact, even a cursory glance at the systems already around, either in regular operational use or under development, will reveal a wide range of different types of systems. If we take first the dimension determined by who/what does most of the work, the machine or the translator or revisor, at one end of the scale are systems where the human does not intervene at all during the process of translation-"batch" systems for convenience here. Even amongst the batch systems there is considerable variety: the degree of pre-editing i~ermitted or required varies greatly, as does the amount of post-editing foreseen. Some systems insist that anything translated by the machine should require no post-editing, and thus (sometimes) reject as unsuitable for machine treatment a part of the text. Others take it for granted that machine translation will normaly be post-edited, just as human translation is normally revised. Some systems aim at giving nothing more than a very rough raw translation , to be used by the human translator only as a starting point for producing his own translation. Some systems require that the document to be translated conform to a restricted syntax, others leave the author relatively free. Next comes a class of systems that one might style "interactive" systems, where the bulk of the work is still done by the machine, but where the system interacts with a human to a greater or lesser degree. Such systems may ask the human, for example, to resolve an ambiguity in the source text, to choose between a set of target language terms, to decide on correct use of prepositions, or any combination of the-~e and other similar tasks. Shifting towards the end of the scale where the bulk of the work is done by a human translator aided by a computer system, there are. systems which will automatically insert identified technical terms, or replace a phrase occurring repeatedly in the text by its translation wherever it appears, leaving the rest of the translation to be done by the human translator, systems where the translator as he produces the translation can consult specialist or general dictionaries, either constructed by the translator …