Although same-language subtitles and captions are produced primarily with the deaf and hard-of-hearing in mind, many hearing film and television viewers choose to use them. This is often done because the presence of closed captioning and subtitles ensures that not … Read More
There are now many software programs for translating natural language, several of them online, such as: SYSTRAN, which powers Yahoo’s Babel Fish Promt, which powers online translation services at Voila.fr and Orange.fr Although no system provides the holy grail of … Read More
Word-sense disambiguation concerns finding a suitable translation when a word can have more than one meaning. The problem was first raised in the 1950s by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.[1] He pointed out that without a “universal encyclopedia”, a machine would never be … Read More
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Fidelity (or “faithfulness”) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French … Read More
Pyramid showing comparative depths of intermediary representation, interlingual machine translation at the peak, followed by transfer-based, then direct translation. Machine translation can use a method based on linguistic rules, which means that words will be translated in a linguistic way … Read More
Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation, or CAT is a form of translation wherein a human translator translates texts using computer software designed to support and facilitate the translation process. Computer-assisted translation is sometimes called machine-assisted, or machine-aided, translation. Computer-assisted translation and … Read More
Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if translation were an exact science — as if consistent, one-to-one correlations existed between the words and phrases of different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may … Read More
Despite being used interchangeably, interpretation and translation are not synonymous, but refer, respectively, to the spoken and written transference of meaning between two languages. Interpreting occurs in real time, in the presence — physical, televised, or telephonic — of the … Read More
The “CC in a TV” symbol Jack Foley created, while senior graphic designer at Boston public broadcaster WGBH that invented captioning for television, is public domain so that anyone who captions TV programs can use it. Closed captioning is the … Read More
The translation process may be stated as: Decoding the meaning of the source text; and Re-encoding this meaning in the target language. Behind this ostensibly simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation. To decode the meaning of the source text … Read More
Various methods for the evaluation for machine translation have been employed. This article will focus on the evaluation of the output of machine translation, rather than on performance or usability evaluation. Before covering the large scale studies, a brief comment … Read More
