|
|
Two German Books About Machine Translation
These slick, green paperbacks could not be more business-like in their appearance. They are clearly serious books intended to deal with serious issues. And their twenty assembled authors carry out this intent in an uncompromising fashion without a hint of the history behind their subject. And herein perhaps lies the chief fault in these competent but circumscribed volumes.
These two books can barely reflect this overwhelming realityperhaps the closest they come to mentioning it is the very first sentence of Volume I: Certainly translators have not been averse to working with computers during this periodthey have in fact been among the most avid users, scouring the Web for all manner of glossaries, editing tools, and translation aids. But to the extent that translators and translation companies have truly switched over to computer techniques, they have tended to abandon Machine Translation in favor of Translation Memory, an approach that bears about as much resemblance to MT as does a lexicon to a log table. So essentially what we have in these two books is the account of a solemn retreat from MTs bygone days of would-be glory. The main topic of both volumes is something called MT Evaluation, essentially a euphemism for trying to discover and explain why these systems have on the whole performed so poorly. The entire second volume is devoted to this topic, with two of the first volumes six papers sharing the same theme (and another two aimed in much the same direction). This leaves only two papers dealing with other topics: one by Isabelle Schrade on cognitive aspects of translation, and another by Jürgen Rolshoven about using object-oriented programming to improve MT systems. The first is almost a parody of Chomskian acolyte Steven Pinkers Cognitive Neuroscience, encouraging an author to string profound bromides together almost endlessly, as is done here. Translation, Dr. Schrade tells us, embraces seven essential qualities (and she devotes a few pages to each of them): Memory, General Knowledge, Linguistic Knowledge, Understanding and Analyzing, Recipient-Oriented Reformulation, Human Intuition, and Creativity. As for Prof. Dr. Rolshoven, he treats us to little more than a tantalizingthough familiarexercise in Chomskian diagram-juggling. None of these criticisms is intended to deny the high seriousness of the task being undertaken nor of the authors sense of loyalty to their aims. The reader watches in awe as they painstakingly explain their quest for a valid methodology, one that will provide the surest and most scientific means of testing and comparing first six and later four different off-the-shelf MT systems. But in what is already an enormous compromise, they decide that their tests should be based on a number of grammatical phenomena which are prominent for text types which in turn are commonly considered typical MT text types (editors italics). If only they could succeed in their quest, perhaps it might lead to a small but significant improvement in MT quality. After much discussion, seven types of phenomena are proposed for testing, but only three are finally selected, providing perhaps some notion of the authors style and rigor: Compounds, comprising a vast array of noun-verb, verb-noun, adjective-noun, and noun-noun composite words; Coordination, their term for converting English ellipticisms into more structured German forms. But how valid are their testing procedures, and how likely are their findings to reach their goal? As the editors of the second volume confess in their final summary, testing the linguistic coverage of an MT system is a tedious, time-consuming task. And a note of unintended comic relief is provided by the one MT developer invited to take part, when he points out first of all that: And amid all the precious examples of MT output, a few more fully certified gems emerge: Es ist franzözisch ein Mitleid, das ich nicht kann sprechen. While The dog that had eaten the hamburger ran away. is truly turned into hamburger: Der Hamburger lief der Hund, der gefressen hatte, davon. (which in English might become The man from Hamburg ran the dog...) The first volume is almost entirely in English, while the second volume weaves quite seamlessly between German and English. In so doing the editors inadvertently show something of their own basic linguistic orientation by inventing two new English abbreviations (or at least new to this reviewer) on the basis of familiar German ones. Thus, in Volume 1 we find resp., no doubt a German stab at respectively, presumably on the basis of German bzw., (beziehungsweise), while Volume 2 yields a.o., evidently an attempt to duplicate the German u.a., (unter anderem) for among others. Both of these are certainly good tries and perhaps ought to exist in English, but they do raise certain doubts as to the overall English capabilities of the authors, especially when they confess that advanced students of English (all native German speakers) performed all the English post-editing in one task supposedly evaluating how long this should take. This linguistic orientation is perhaps also revealed in the paper I find most interesting, the first volumes final offering: The Automatic Translation of Idioms: Machine Translation vs. Translation Memory Systems by Martin Volk. This piece comes down firmly on the side of Translation Memory as being superior to MT for translating idioms. But I question its basic dichotomy, that there is a clear and discernible difference between what we call idioms on the one hand and the more predictable parts of language on the other. I am not altogether sure that this dichotomy will stand up to any truly close analysis, particularly if we begin to consider more exotic languages, which even MT developers claim they will one day be able to include by using an Interlingual approach. It might be supposed that this is merely a linguistic quibble, and that surely what appear to be simple sentences of the type You are beautiful must be much the same the world around. But I can easily conceive of languages and culturesand I believe many of our readers can as wellwhere the words You, are, and even beautiful might be up for grabs and pose unexpected problems even for human translatorsand certainly for machine translation systems as well. It could yet turn out that allor almost allof language is unpredictably and close to arbitrarily idiomatic in nature. And that only the coincidence of two languages, such as English and German or English and French, growing closely together over several centuries, has persuaded us that this may not be the case.
E-mail this article to your colleague! Need more translation jobs? Click here! Translation agencies are welcome to register here - Free! Freelance translators are welcome to register here - Free! |
|
|
Legal Disclaimer Site Map |