Machine Translation - How To Get A Good Machine Translation (1)


by Stefan Dowd - Date: 2007-03-21 - Word Count: 316 Share This!

The quality of the translation depends on two aspects: A text written in formal language. A professional machine translator.

In this first article, we will discuss the aspect related with the source text. For this a definition of language will help us.

Definition: A language is a collection of words, of conventions and semantic rules.

We will now analyze the elements of the definition.

Vocabulary: Collection of valid words in a language.
Grammar: System of rules which govern how to form the words, and how they combine to form sentences.
Spelling: Branch of the normative grammar that points out the rules of correct representation of a language.
Semantics: The study of the meaning of the expressions of a language.
Syntax: The order and the relationship between words and other structural elements in the sentences.

All language that can be developed on the base of this definition is denominated Formal Language. Any other expression way is denominated Informal Language.

Formal language: The language that is used in schools, in text books, in businesses and in the government's transactions. (academic)
Informal language: The language that is used in daily conversations. (social)

The idioms of the informal language vary according to the region, the time, people's habits, the tradition. The informality implies the nonexistence of rules.

On the other hand, the formal language is based on rules. Having rules, it is not difficult to implement an automatic system that recognizes them. The objective of a translator is to translate a text written in formal language.

To get a good machine translation, the text should be: Grammatically correct : without spelling errors, adjusted to the rules. Semantically correct : meaning in the text. Syntactically correct : words and punctuation marks used correctly.

To proof it, this article was written in Spanish and it was translated with a professional machine translator.

In the next article we will discuss the aspect related with the translator, their two fundamental elements and how to recognize a professional translator.


Related Tags: language, language translation, translator, machine translation

Author is a freelance writer. If you want to see the original text in Spanish and to learn more about machine translators, visit this page

Machine Translation - How to Get a Good Machine Translation

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: