Modern Language Forum

To ESTABLISH effective bilingual glossaries for mechanical translation will require some sort of solution for three problems: how to predict the words that will occur in the foreignlanguage contexts to be translated: how to predict the English meaning of the words in those contexts; and how to reduce to a minimum the searching time required to locate any item in the glossary. Let us recognize at the outset that these problems have by no means been solved for translation in general. Anyone who has worked at translating, say, from German into English knows that the standard desk dictionaries have at best a limited effectiveness ; that they do not list, for instance, any but the commonest technical terms; and that they seldom explore the semantic range of the forms they list. The larger encyclopedic dictionaries provide richer fare, but make it harder to digest. The number of forms listed is increased, but the searching time is thereby also increased to such a degree that efficiency is markedly reduced. Moreover, even the most encyclopedic of the encyclopedic dictionaries are inadequate guides to any sort of highly technical discourse. Finally, not even the so-called scientific dictionaries, which are devised specifically for the translation of technical material, provide anything like an exhaustive listing of technical terms; and they assume the availability of general dictionaries for. non-technical terms. Thus the well-equipped translator of technical contexts must ideally be provided with both a scientific