Session 8A: Machine Translation

In the dark ages of machine translation, it is said that researchers at tempted a Direct Approach--word-for-word substitution. But this could not have survived much beyond the first inspection of the output. The most common approach adopted in working machine translation systems is the Transfer Approach illustrated in Figure 1. A text in a source language is analyzed to some depth, producing, for example, a parse tree or a logical form for the sentences in the text. Then transfer rules are applied to this representation to produce a representation at the corresponding level for the target language. The text is then generated in the target language.